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Miserly Catholics?

2012-04-03T06:40:00-04:00

Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith is leading a multifaceted, multiyear study aimed at learning why some folks are more generous than others. Although the work, which involves scholars from ND and other institutions, is far from complete, Smith has found one preliminary result that Catholics may find unflattering and troubling: As a group, we’re tight.

Relative to other denominations, Catholics are not as generous with their tithing.

Smith, who first reported the result in his 2008 book Passing the Plate, has yet to explain definitively why this is so, but the William R. Kenan Jr. professor of sociology has some guesses.

He suggests one reason for the lower level of Catholic financial generosity may be that as far back as the Roman emperor Constantine, Catholicism has had a history of being “the state church,” the church that society as a whole, rather than individuals, helps support. “While the Catholic Church was never the state church in America, that notion is still part of the DNA of the tradition,” Smith argues.

A second explanation may be that Catholic churches — the buildings — are technically owned by the local bishop, unlike Protestant churches which are owned directly by the congregation. Therefore, he believes, the need to give may be felt less intensely. “Catholics ‘belong’ to a church, but they don’t feel they financially ‘own’ it as Protestants do,” Smith says.

Another factor limiting generosity may be the upward mobility of U.S. Catholics as they work to acquire wealth. “In the 20th century American Catholics went from being urban, ethnic, working class, persecuted, relatively poor to being suburban, middle class, moving upward economically, educationally in assimilation and acculturation,” Smith points out.

Finally, Smith believes the long tradition of a low-cost church workforce composed of nuns, brothers and priests has lulled Catholics into thinking the church has less financial need, even though much of that cheap labor pool is now gone because of the massive decline in vocations after Vatican II.

Babies listen up

2012-04-03T06:20:00-04:00

Babies are fantastic listeners. They may not know what you’re saying, but they pay rapt attention to language, and they are constantly looking for patterns to help them make sense of it all, even tracking rudimentary grammar concepts.

“Infants have a problem to solve whenever they hear a word,” explains Jill Lany. “A word could mean anything, so it’s crucial to narrow it down. Babies are always looking for clues from context and sound.”

The Notre Dame assistant professor of psychology, who studies how infants acquire language, says babies appear to learn the rudiments by plucking out bits of information from the ongoing sound stream that they then use to help identify words, track what they’re hearing or predict what they might hear.

For instance, in English nouns tend to occur after such words as “a” and “the.” “So, if a baby hears ‘It’s a,’ there’s a pretty good chance the next thing she hears will be an object label, a noun,” Lany points out. “Babies notice words with similar sounds and notice that these word sound patterns occur in a similar context.”

The psychologist has found that 12-month-old babies are able to distinguish and track “adjacent relationships” in which a cue sound, such as “it’s a” comes immediately next to the noun, as in “it’s a ducky.” By 15 months, children are able to track more complicated nonadjacent relationships in which the cue may be further removed, as in “it’s a yellow ducky.”

Lany has found that 12-month-olds who are repeatedly exposed to “adjacent relationship” word-sound situations are learning something that helps them master tracking the more complicated nonadjacent relationships.

“There seems to be a scaffolding or bootstrapping process going on which sets the stage for learning more complicated language patterns,” Lany says.

A touch of the bubbly

2012-04-03T06:10:00-04:00

We’ve always known bubbles were fun; now it turns out they’re important too. For instance, Notre Dame’s Gretar Tryggvason points out that an understanding of the floating, ephemeral spheres is vital for the safe and efficient operation of nuclear power reactors.

The acting chairman of Notre Dame’s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering has spent much of his career studying “bubbly flows,” creating complex mathematical models that attempt to predict how bubbles act in various fluids. The mathematics needed to make such predictions is complicated, often taking weeks of computer time at some of the nation’s most powerful supercomputers.

Some of the flow expert’s most recent work has been centered on improving nuclear power production. Specifically, Tryggvason and his colleagues developed a computer simulation to predict the behavior of vapor bubbles forming on nuclear fuel rods in boiling water nuclear reactors.

Electricity is generated when nuclear fuel heats water, creating steam that turns electric turbines, he explains. “The crucial question is what happens to the vapor bubbles created when nuclear fuel heats that water to turn the turbines that generate electricity.”

There are two important reasons to know the answer, he says. First, a bubbly flow agitates coolant water, which can affect the buildup of “crud,” chemical deposits on fuel rods that can adversely influence performance. Second, if vapor bubbles remain on the fuel rod surface, the likelihood of burnout increases. All the water boils away, and without coolant the nuclear fuel melts down.

And you thought bubbles were just for fun. (Pop.)

Water, water everywhere, but not enough to drink

2012-01-30T07:00:00-05:00

As climate change accelerates, worldwide fresh water supplies are predicted to become increasingly stressed. However, since oceans cover 70 percent of the planet, you might be skeptical of a water problem. With all that sea sloshing around, there should be enough for everybody, right? Just remove the salt. Problem solved.

Well, not quite. As much as desalination, making fresh water from saline sources such as the ocean, may seem the perfect answer to the world’s increasing fresh water needs, it is a limited answer, William Phillip of Notre Dame and Menachem Elimelech of Yale write in a recent Science article.

Great strides in desalination truly have been made in recent years, the chemical engineering professors say. Innovations such as improved membranes and better pumps have dramatically improved process efficiency, and large-scale reverse osmosis desalination plants are being constructed at a rapid pace. In fact, they note worldwide desalination capacity is projected to double by the year 2016.

Despite those gains, however, the researchers say the number of people living in water-stressed regions is projected to increase from one-third of the world’s population to two-thirds by the year 2025.

Phillip and Elimelech argue that desalination may be one tool to help solve the world’s fresh water needs, but it is does have its downside. For instance, desalination is probably the most energy-intensive method for increasing water supplies, and there isn’t much hope for improvement.

The Notre Dame and Yale professors point out that “reverse osmosis,” the most advanced desalination technology, has been tweaked so much in the past 40 years that it is near the theoretical and practical limits of its efficiency. Since the desalination process itself is about as good as it gets, they argue any future improvements are likely to come in the pre-treatment phase, where other contaminants, such as organic matter from decomposing seaweed, are filtered out.

“The main point we wanted to make is that desalination should be thought of as an option only after all other more sustainable fresh water sources, such as conservation and water recycling, have been exhausted. Just about any fresh water treatment technology is much less energy intensive than desalination,” Phillip says.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of this magazine.

Illustration copyright iStockphoto.com.

Wired for Rewards

2012-01-09T08:20:00-05:00

The maxim, “With age comes wisdom,” may in fact have a neurological basis.

That’s what Darrell Worthy, assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University, suspects. His experiments show that older adults tend to make decisions based on long-term benefits, while younger subjects are driven more by instant gratification.

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Gotta Have It Now, Right Now

Are those differences due at least partly to age-related differences in the brain? Worthy and fellow researchers hope to answer that question by running functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on the brains of people as they make decisions.

A growing number of scientists, including Worthy, believe the ventral striatum section of the brain is involved in instant gratification, while the prefrontal cortex is more connected to delayed gratification. “Aging leads to a lot of decline in different neural areas, and one of those areas is the ventral striatum,” Worthy explains. “That area is implicated in assigning value to the immediate rewards you receive. Anytime you are rewarded or punished the area becomes activated.” He and his colleagues are investigating whether the frontal areas of the brain that are used in more conscious, deliberative processing become more active in older adults to make up for other age-related changes.

Researchers also are studying links between the ventral striatum and prefrontal cortex. “Just looking at those two parts may be too simplified,” Worthy says. “There’s an emerging distinction between the networks linking the striatum to the prefrontal cortex. The limbic loop appears to be related more to emotion and immediate gratification, while the cognitive and motor loops would be related more to delaying gratification.”

Another major study of instant versus delayed gratification also showed the importance of the ventral striatum and prefrontal cortex. University researchers recently did a follow-up study with some of the people who participated in the well-known marshmallow experiment at Stanford University some 40 years ago when they were 4 years old. The study examined the behavior of the subjects — now adults in their 40s — to determine whether they demonstrated the same tendency toward instant or delayed gratification that they did as children when choosing between eating one marshmallow now or waiting a while to get two.

Not only did the study show that the tendency toward instant or delayed gratification remained constant over time, but through the use of fMRIs, it also found differences in the brain activity of the subjects. “The ventral striatum that has been implicated in reward and risk-taking showed a difference between groups, as well as the ventral prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in impulse control,” says BJ Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell. “These regions have been shown to be involved in addiction and substance abuse.”

Such brain research could lead to greater understanding and perhaps even new treatments for various addictions and other problems related to impulse control and instant gratification.

12th century wisdom for the 21st

2012-01-08T09:15:00-05:00

She may have lived in the 12th century, but the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen speaks to the 21st, says Margot Fassler, Notre Dame’s Keough-Hesburgh professor of music history and liturgy.

The historian of sacred music has been working for several years on a ground-breaking study of the medieval Benedictine nun. In her lifetime, the many-faceted genius made significant contributions in theology, poetry, music, art, science and medicine, as well as founding several religious communities.

“I think people today are looking for ways to bring many things together,” Fassler says. “Hildegard was a theologian, composer, artist and scientist who had the ability to synthesize knowledge.”

The mystic is most widely known for her theological insights drawn from a series of visions that she explained and illustrated in her treatise Scivias and other works. “Hildegard saw every person’s life as a kind of epic saga, a quest for theological understanding, where each of us have choices to make between good and evil,” Fassler observes.

Exhibiting what may seem a modern attitude toward ambiguity, the Benedictine mystic believed that as long as a person holds the question open as to whether God exists, she remains on the road to some sort of salvation, the ND theologian notes.

In particular, Fassler has been intrigued with Hildegard’s vision known as “The Cosmic Egg.” The image, illustrated and discussed in Scivias, basically presents an Aristotelian view of the world, Fassler says. The Benedictine mystic sees the egg as a metaphor for the world and church. It is a dynamic force, with an outer shell of flame surrounded by an inner darkness of struggles. The Earth is suspended in the middle, surrounded by virtues sparkling like stars.

The Notre Dame professor says in the Cosmic Egg, as in Hildegard’s play, Ordo Virtutum (The Order of the Virtues), the nun places the quest for theological understanding at the center of the cosmos. “You can see Hildegard putting everyday decisions that humans make at the heart of the purpose of God’s creation,” Fassler says. “It’s an extraordinary view, a microcosm and macrocosm.”

John Monczunski is an associate editor of this magazine.

Illustration of ‘The Cosmic Egg’ with the permission of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Hildegard, Eibingen.

How is the brain wired?

2011-12-06T10:00:00-05:00

How the brain works remains largely a mystery. But physicists at Notre Dame’s Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA), working with neuroscientists in France, have recently shed some new light on the process.

Understanding how the brain works on a neuronal level would be almost impossible, ND physics Professor Zoltan Toroczkai notes. “You’d get lost in the detail. It would be like looking at a blueprint of the tens of millions of transistors in the integrated circuits of an iPhone or laptop.”

Therefore the ND researchers, who study networks of all types, from Facebook to disease spread, took what is called a “top-down approach” to their analysis.

Specifically, Toroczkai and post-doctoral associate Maria Ercsey-Ravasz found that the cortex of the primate brain is organized into a weighted network of functional areas. Analyzing a massive amount of data on macaque brains collected by the French scientists, the ND researchers found that brain network connections are greatest between areas that are closest to each other, trailing off in a consistent pattern related to distance.

Just how complicated brain circuitry is can be illustrated by the fact that the adult primate brain contains an estimated100 billion neurons connected at more than 100 trillion points. All these connections are organized into bundles running between the 83 functional areas in the macaque brain and more than 120 areas in the human brain.

“The brain seems to work very differently than a computer,” Toroczkai notes. “Although it has not been proven, it seems to employ a vastly different computing paradigm than the zeros and ones that today’s digital machines use.”

The ultimate goal of the iCeNSA researchers is to understand that new paradigm as well as how sense information is converted into electrical signals and then processed in the brain.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magazine.

The Damage Done

2011-12-06T09:00:00-05:00

Peter Grant ’83 played interhall football for Notre Dame’s Grace Hall. Dave Duerson, a classmate and casual acquaintance of Grant’s from the dorm, was an All-American defensive back and an 11-year NFL veteran who won two Super Bowl rings. Their athletic careers could not have been more different.

But Grant and Duerson were alike in competitive passion. They played hard. And in the end, the game did not distinguish between them. It turned their intensity into an insidious, mysterious disease. Years removed from their last athletic collisions, they suffered a toll far worse than aching knees or arthritic hips, a loss impossible to repair or replace. They lost themselves and, within days of each other last February, their lives.

Collisions

Spero Karas ’89, the Atlanta Falcons team physician, talks about the intricate, delicate calibration of the brain in a way that suggests he keeps his in fine working order: “Brain cells communicate through ion channels, a normal flux of sodium and potassium and calcium, and then less implicated, of course, magnesium. There’s a fine balance of these as cells communicate with each other in the brain.”

To explain how a high-speed collision can jostle that communication into incoherence, Karas reduces it to a layman’s image: think of the brain at impact, he says, as a racquetball bouncing around a court. “You can imagine those cellular processes going haywire during a blunt-force trauma.”

That’s how someone suffers a concussion. When a collision generates g-forces strong enough to interfere with brain-cell functioning, the immediate effects are familiar: wooziness, confusion, slurred speech. “There’s still no treatment for it, there’s still no medication, there’s still no really firm diagnostic tool,” Karas says. “There’s very much still that we don’t know.”

Doctors do know that a player should never return to competition until the symptoms have subsided and an objective level of neurological functioning has been restored. Computerized testing before an injury occurs, now common at all levels for athletes in high-impact sports, establishes their baseline level of cognitive ability. After a concussion, they must return to that level before receiving clearance to play. This method identifies subtle variations in memory, orientation and reaction time that observation alone might miss, which helps prevent debilitating injuries to vulnerable brains that can occur if players return too soon.

But there’s another hazard, more difficult to identify, and possibly more dangerous: the cumulative effect of hit after hit after hit that never causes a diagnosed concussion. “Linemen might take a thousand, fifteen-hundred hits to the brain every season. That’s the nature of the position,” says neuropsychologist Robert Stern, co-director of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy — the “brain bank” that investigates trauma-induced disease. “They may not complain of any symptoms, or few symptoms, or irregular symptoms.”

Nothing, in other words, that keeps a player off the field. Yet each collision could be contributing to the development of a degenerative condition with far worse consequences. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is the contemporary term for the disease forensic pathologist Harrison Stanford Martland identified in 1928 as dementia pugilistica. Punch drunk.

Repeated blows to the head can lead to this mental state that causes symptoms similar to — and, Stern says, often diagnosed as — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease or the more general term, dementia.

Neuropathologist Ann McKee examines brains donated to the research center, which now has more than 70 from deceased football and hockey players, boxers, and military veterans who experienced combat trauma. On thin slices of the brain stems, McKee identifies the pathology that distinguishes CTE from those comparable diseases. An accumulation of the protein tau inhibits brain-cell function. The condition progresses slowly, but nothing can detect CTE in a living patient. More and more cells die and, depending on the areas of the brain affected, memory loss, mood or behavioral changes offer the first indication of a downward spiral that no treatment can prevent.

A fog

Before she got to know him, Dave Duerson’s future wife, Alicia, feared him. He played with such ferocity that she couldn’t imagine him acting any other way. Their first meeting dispelled that notion, and they stayed together for more than 25 years. “He was so sweet and kind,” Alicia told The New York Times. “He could leave the game on the field and go back to being Dave.”

For more than a decade that included Super Bowl titles with the Chicago Bears and New York Giants, he left the field and went back to being a loving husband and doting father to the couple’s four children. But sometimes just getting home after games was a challenge. In interviews after his death, Alicia recalled driving him because he felt too foggy to be behind the wheel himself.

Tregg Duerson ’08 doesn’t remember much about his father’s “Double D” football persona but recalls him “sleeping like a whole day” to recover from the physical punishment of NFL games. To Dave Duerson, the symptoms — dizziness, nausea, headaches — were routine. With some rest, he was ready to go again.

One report estimated that Duerson suffered 10 concussions, a number that sounds low to Tregg, given his dad’s aggressive reputation and the era when he played. “I think it was a much different culture than today.” And that number doesn’t even account for the untold number of normal hits that he just slept off.

Questions

Repeated blows to the head — whether or not they are severe enough to produce concussions — are a known cause of CTE, but those collisions alone are not enough to trigger the disease. Otherwise every former athlete in a high-impact sport would be debilitated later in life.

A growing body of research, especially the identification of CTE in 14 of the 15 deceased professional football players who donated their brains to Boston University’s study, has stirred public concern. And it’s not just pros, the people who exposed themselves to the risk for decades dating back to youth football. At age 21, University of Pennsylvania defensive end and team captain Owen Thomas committed suicide. His parents donated his brain, which had the telltale buildup of the protein tau associated with CTE. An anonymous, deceased 18-year-old high school football player is the youngest person ever shown to have the disease.

Stern notes that the prevalence of CTE among his center’s subjects reflects, in part, a self-selected group whose mental problems gave them or their families an incentive to seek a posthumous explanation. Still, 14 out of 15 professional football players is a startling statistic, especially for a condition all but absent among the general population. Although the victims have a history of repeated head trauma in common, the underlying susceptibility — why them and not their teammates? — remains a mystery.

“Are some people genetically more prone to developing the disease? Is it things like the age at which someone starts getting their head hit, or the overall duration of the exposure to brain trauma? Or the repetitiveness without rest in between hits?” Stern says. “We just don’t know any of those answers.”

Multiple hits

Katie Grant ’11 can only imagine her father as a high school athlete. If Peter Grant played football and hockey anything like he competed against his son, Zachary, “I’m sure he was very intense,” Katie says with a laugh.

He must have been. By his own account, Grant suffered seven concussions, including two that put him in the hospital. Once he was carted off the field, unconscious.

The specifics of the injuries — the circumstances, the severity, the length of recovery — have been lost in the retelling and the vague recollections of family and friends. “We also don’t know,” Katie Grant says, “if he took the full amount of time to heal after them.”

That’s a crucial piece of information. Using an individual’s baseline results, doctors today determine when players can return based on computerized, objective measurements. In the late 1970s, when Grant played high-school sports, identifying how many fingers a trainer held up might have been enough. “Now what’s important is screening, avoiding a second injury to a compromised brain,” Karas says. “That’s where the catastrophic, irreparable damage occurs.”

It’s possible that Peter Grant suffered that kind of irreparable damage before he even graduated from high school.

Long-term fears

Tim Ridder ’99 remembers his concussion and its aftermath the way most people might recall their 4th birthday party. “Remembering,” he says, “is kind of a funny word to throw in there.” From a video of his sideline evaluation and recollections of family and friends — but not from memory — he has cobbled together an account that has become the story.

During a preseason practice as a ND freshman offensive lineman in August 1995, Ridder suffered a concussion on one play and, unaware, returned to the line of scrimmage for the next. After the snap, he never moved from his stance. Assistant coach Joe Moore barreled toward him, raging. But when Moore got there, he found Ridder dazed and in tears, and summoned the doctor.

Longtime Notre Dame sports-medicine specialist Dr. Jim Moriarity went to work, with a camera recording the examination for teaching purposes. In addition to answering Moriarity’s questions, Ridder follows the doctor’s finger with his eyes, touches his nose, and wobbles trying to put one foot in front of the other like a drunk driver failing a field-sobriety test. “I think at that point I told them I had won the Blue-Gold game on my own,” Ridder says, “and I had never even been a part of the Blue-Gold game.”

He hadn’t even officially enrolled as a student. Freshman orientation was the next day, but instead of attending the event, he somehow ended up on the other side of campus, where a friend found him. Over the next week, he called home four times to tell his parents he had suffered a concussion. Not only were they aware of the injury, but Ridder’s father was at the practice when it happened.

Now 34 and a middle-school principal in Leadville, Colorado, Ridder thinks about the potential long-term effects of his “one and only” diagnosed concussion that kept him out about six weeks. All the hits from a football career that included two years in the NFL already reveal their residual aches in his knees and shoulders. He can live with those things. “I don’t want my brain to be the thing that happens early,” Ridder says.

Even that threat — memory loss, dementia, mood or behavioral changes — comes with a sense of culpability. “I did this to my body,” he says. “I had a lot of fun doing it; I knew what I was getting myself into.” Then he reconsiders the thought. “Maybe not completely,” he says, but common sense suggested what science has begun to establish — the correlation between repeated hits and mental decline later in life. Ridder remembers a professor telling him that if men were meant to play football, they wouldn’t have to wear an exoskeleton.

He thought more about the physical consequences then, conscious that his body could absorb only so much punishment without retaliating. That awareness shaped the message he delivered to children about the importance of education: “I’d say, ‘Your body falls apart, but your brain doesn’t. Take care of your brain because that’s what you’ll have going for you long after your body breaks down.’”

Moving forward

After he retired from the NFL, a champion with a charitable heart who had received the league’s Man of the Year award for humanitarian work, Duerson’s professional success shifted to a new arena. His business aspirations were at least as grand as anything he pursued as an athlete — and he paid his dues like a rookie to achieve them. After retiring from football in 1993, he became a McDonald’s franchisee, which requires months of training that includes working in a restaurant. “A year before that, this guy was in the NFL,” Tregg Duerson says. “That’s saying something. He was very hard-working no matter what he did.”

After owning three McDonald’s franchises, he bought a majority stake in meat-supplier Fair Oaks Farms and later started Duerson Foods. He remained involved in NFL labor issues and became a Notre Dame trustee. In business, he was the same ambitious, charismatic success story he had been in football. Even then, whether he recognized it or not, the damage already had been done.

Crash test

Helmets don’t help. Not enough, anyway. Most current models are not designed to protect against concussions at all. They are meant to prevent skull fractures — and they do. “But the head still moves around inside the helmet,” neuropsychologist Stern says, “and the brain, more importantly, still moves around inside the skull. That’s what causes brain trauma.”

A Virginia Tech study — sort of a crash test for football helmets — released a star-rating system in May, the first comprehensive consumer safety information ever published on the industry. As if to illustrate how little had been previously known, the NFL’s most widely used helmet — the league does not mandate what players wear — finished next to last in the study.

There have been improvements. New helmet models absorb more g-forces before they reach the brain; this could reduce the number of concussions. But no current technology can prevent them. Says Stern, “Equipment is not the answer — or it’s not the sole answer.”

As Stern and others continue to pursue research breakthroughs, they know this much: Eventually, some of the people exposed to the thwack of helmet on helmet, over and over again, will get sick. “The key to how to help prevent CTE, or at least decrease the risk,” Stern says, “is to reduce the overall exposure.”

That means less hitting in practice, a precautionary tactic beginning to gain traction. The new NFL collective-bargaining agreement limits contact in offseason workouts and regular-season practices. At the college level, the Ivy League has imposed the most stringent hitting restrictions yet. The rule, implemented this season, allows tackling, or contact of any kind, only twice a week. Current NCAA regulations permit five full-contact practices.

Loving life

There is a history of depression in Peter Grant’s family. In his early 20s, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he managed for decades with medication. He was open about his condition with his wife and three children, but it was controlled so well that nobody else would have known. “He was always his usual self,” Katie Grant says.

Outgoing and active in his West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, community, Grant chaired the town finance committee, served on the Bridgewater Savings bank board and coached kids’ sports. An accountant with an undergraduate degree in business, he built a career in finance and operations for The Boston Globe and later worked as a media consultant. “He loved his job and the media business in general,” Katie Grant says.

She describes all her father’s interests that way. He loved to talk, he loved to read, he loved to travel. He especially loved Notre Dame. That influenced his daughters. Katie graduated in May and younger sister, Chrissy, is a senior. (Their brother, Zachary, is in high school.) The memory of her dad’s animated campus visits makes Katie laugh. “It was almost too much.”

A sporting chance

Tim Ridder’s torn. He believes safety should be a priority, equipment and medical treatment should be state-of-the-art, and athletes should have as much information as possible about the risks of participation. On the other hand, he loved playing football, and he would hate to see the sport suffer if reasonable precautions could be put in place. “We have to make sure we’re not creating another Rome,” Ridder says, “where there are gladiators dying on the field depending on whether Caesar gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.”

Some former players believe that’s how they were treated. Claiming the NFL mishandled concussion treatment and concealed evidence for decades about the long-term effects of head injuries, in July a group of 75 former players sued the league. The NFL vowed to fight the suit, but its approach to head-injury awareness has changed in recent years.

A league medical committee formed in 1994 produced reports downplaying the ramifications of multiple concussions. A 2007 pamphlet informed players that “current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is treated properly.”

The message shifted before the 2010 season with locker-room posters describing the threat of depression and dementia, new rules about concussion treatment, and a $1 million donation to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. “It is the hot-button item in the NFL,” Karas says. “It’s probably what we spend the most time on in our disability meetings. What is the NFL but a large corporation that employs thousands of people? And being able to characterize the amount of injury and potential disability and getting these guys back safely is the number-one medical issue in the NFL.”

Duerson’s fall

Duerson understood football-related disability as well as anyone could without medical training. And he knew the horror stories all too well.

Part of a six-member panel that evaluated retired players’ disability claims, Duerson heard about the suicides and the substance abusers. He listened to stories about wild personality changes — violence, irritability, depression.

Duerson could sense himself unraveling in similar ways. At first, he made offhand comments about his brain, expressing concern over symptoms he already felt and fear of how they might progress. His children never knew about those worries. “He was a very prideful man,” says Tregg Duerson, who had never heard of CTE before his father died. “He would not have had that conversation with me.”

But unmistakable changes in personality and judgment altered the course of Duerson’s life. The patient man and prudent executive his family knew began to lash out in profane explosions and make bad business decisions that led Duerson Foods into financial peril. “He always had a very strong temper,” Tregg Duerson says, but in retrospect, he can see how the disease intensified that trait. “I think toward the end of his life, his temper was more quick — he was easily agitated.”

Duerson’s personal problems splashed into the newspapers in 2005, when he was arrested after pushing Alicia against a wall at the Morris Inn on the University campus. He pleaded no contest, resigned from the Notre Dame board, and soon he and his wife were divorced. Everything seemed to be falling apart because his personality had changed in cataclysmic ways that he feared with chilling prescience.

Mental collapse

In December 2009 something changed. Medication that had controlled Peter Grant’s mental illness for more than two decades stopped working. He became lethargic and withdrawn. Depressed.

Grant’s doctors adjusted the dosages, to no avail, and searched in vain to explain alarming mood changes. Home for Christmas that December, when her father’s new symptoms surfaced, Katie Grant thought he was preoccupied with work. When he visited Notre Dame two months later for Junior Parents Weekend, she recognized the depth of his depression.

His usual enthusiasm for a trip to South Bend vanished. “He just sat in the hotel room, didn’t want to do anything, didn’t even want to walk around campus,” Katie says. “It was a 180-degree transformation from anything I had ever seen.”

Through the summer and into the fall of 2010, it got worse, still without explanation. He had manic episodes — not sleeping, running around, talking incoherently. “Really sort of out of his mind,” Katie says. One episode in October left him hospitalized for two weeks. After his release, he remained unstable. Alternately manic and depressed, Grant would claim to be feeling all right on his better days, “but it was a lot worse than he was letting us know.”

There was no violence or anger, just withdrawal and forgetfulness. A dinner conversation would disappear in the fog of his mind, and when the subject came up again a day or two later, he would be upset that he hadn’t been told about it before.

That change was especially jarring for Grant’s family, who counted his intelligence and sharp attentiveness among his most notable characteristics. He was always on top of things. The difference could not have been lost on Grant himself, either, and they imagine that the frustration of his prolonged mental descent took an untold toll.

“I definitely think he felt hopeless,” Katie says, “that he just wasn’t going to get better.”

Duerson felt the same way. His financial problems reached their nadir in 2010, when he filed for bankruptcy and Alicia sued to collect unpaid child support, seeking assets that included his NFL Man of the Year award. By then he lived in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, a family vacation destination where he moved full-time. In retrospect, he might have moved there to retreat from life as he felt his ebbing. Duerson’s friend Ray Ellis told the Miami New Times, “He didn’t want to crumble in front of an audience.”

Legacy

On February 8, Peter Grant committed suicide. Nine days later, Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest, a report that reverberated around the country because of the reason he did it that way: to preserve his brain for CTE research.

Both the Grant and Duerson families donated the brains. Grant’s showed a mild level of CTE, Duerson’s much more advanced. Announcing the findings in Duerson’s case, the neuropathologist McKee displayed slides showing extensive damage to areas that affect “judgment, inhibition, impulse control, mood and memory.”

There’s solace in the CTE diagnosis for both families, insight into the torment that led Grant and Duerson to take their own lives. Beyond the emotional comfort, Stern says, their donations establish a legacy of medical evidence that transcends their own tragedies. Uncertainty still surrounds the disease. Players are left to wonder whether they will suffer a similar fate, or if hints hidden in the brains of previous victims will reduce the impact.

Jason Kelly, a former sports columnist for the South Bend Tribune, is an associate editor of the University of Chicago Magazine. His most recent book is Shelby’s Folly: Jack Dempsey, Doc Kearns, and the Shakedown of a Montana Boomtown. Email him at jasonakelly@comcast.net.

Walling off noise

2011-12-06T08:00:00-05:00

Driving around, you’ve probably noticed those tall sound barriers erected to minimize highway noise near residential areas and wondered if they work. Notre Dame’s Joe Fernando and those who live near Arizona’s East Loop 101 Freeway answer: “Not always.”

When the 101 Freeway was constructed several years ago near Scottsdale, engineers erected 8-foot-high “sound walls” to dampen traffic noise. Once the cars and trucks began flowing, so did the complaints. Strangely, Fernando says, most of the complaints came from residents about a half mile from the highway. In fact, the noise closer to the road was not as loud as that farther away.

Although standard calculations predict the barriers should have worked just fine, the Wayne and Diana Murdy Professor of Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences at Notre Dame suspected local atmospheric conditions shaped by the terrain might be distorting the sound waves, causing them to travel far enough to disturb the residents.

Fernando’s team and researchers from the Arizona Department of Transportation measured noise levels and atmospheric conditions near the roadway. Using the data, the Notre Dame engineering researcher developed mathematical models of highway sound transmission that take into account weather conditions.

Sure enough, the models showed that such things as wind shear and cooling temperatures at night could affect sound transmission. “Normally, sound goes in every direction,” Fernando says. “However, if wind is blowing toward a sound source, the sound going toward the wind will be lofted upward, while the sound moving away from the wind is concentrated down. Also, if the ground is hot, the sound will ride the hot air up, and then descend as the air cools, traveling in a big arc.”

While sound barrier walls can be effective in certain instances, Fernando says, “in this particular case there was no point because, as our mathematical model shows, the sound goes straight up. Our calculations showed the sound rising to 50 feet, so an 8- or 10-foot wall would have no effect.”

Fernando says the ND mathematical model offers highway designers a way to predict where sound barriers would be ineffective and not worth constructing, thus saving taxpayer money.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magazine.

Road Warrior app

2011-10-21T09:00:00-04:00

Does the thought of merging onto the freeway cause you to break into a cold sweat? When you gun your car, hurtling down the entrance ramp, do you pray fast and furious to Everything Holy, begging for a gap that lets you ease into the flow alive and unscathed? All those prayers notwithstanding, do you remain convinced that Death and Destruction eagerly await you, smiling, rubbing their hands together at the end of the ramp?

Fear not, intrepid Road Warrior. Christian Poellabauer, Notre Dame associate professor of computer science and engineering, and his colleagues at ND’s Wireless Institute are working on a research project aimed at eliminating some of life’s most frightening moments behind the wheel.

Poellabauer’s group is collaborating with Toyota engineer John Kenney ’88Ph.D. on methods to improve the reliability of “dedicated short-range communications” (DSRC), a technology that allows cars to “talk” to one another.

For instance, a DSRC safe auto app might warn a driver of an impending collision, or it could gauge traffic flow and help with freeway merging. The app also could alert a driver that a vehicle is in the car’s blind spot, or tell when it’s okay to change lanes.

Safety-related information could be displayed not only on a car’s dashboard but also on the driver’s cell phone. Additionally, Poellabauer says smart phone sensors might be used by the system to gather additional safety-enhancing information.

Today’s cell phones, the associate director of ND’s Wireless Institute explains, offer engineers a bundle of sensors, including everything from global positioning systems and accelerometers — which are handy for auto safety applications — to light sensors, barometric pressure gauges and who-knows-what by the time you read this. Plus all of these gauges and sensors can “talk” to one another. That linking capability, Poellabauer says, offers amazing possibilities.

If, for instance, all the smart phone barometric pressure gauges were linked, it might make for super accurate local weather prediction. With all these data collection points we might create some interesting and useful things, Poellabauer says. Imagination is the only limit.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magazine.

If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em

2011-10-04T09:00:00-04:00

Notre Dame graduate students Matt Barnes, Andy Deines and Sheina Sim are not your average chefs — really they’re not chefs at all — but they are convinced their studies of invasive species can help you put together both an eco-friendly and appetizing menu for your next tailgate.

Inspired by their biology lab’s annual invasive species cookout, which features such specialties as rusty crayfish, Chinese Mystery Snail and earthworms, the group decided to take their rare yet environmentally savvy eating habits public. In January, they launched their website, invasivore.org, which combines invasives research with an innovative yet instinctive solution: “If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em.” While they educate people on the ecological and economic ramifications of these biological invaders, the food isn’t a bad hook.

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Working under Notre Dame biology professors David Lodge and Jeffrey Feder with support from ND’s Global Linkages of Biology, Environment and Society (GLOBES) fellowships, the three have encountered invasive species everywhere. Ranging from weedy plants to feral swine, these organisms are known for entering a new habitat and creating an ecological — and often economic — disruption.

Destructive, yes. But delicious. Barnes, Deines and Sim have found many ways to turn a nuisance into a nosh. For now, ND’s Invasivores have shied away from the notorious Asian carp and have instead proposed an impressive list of unique dishes using species that are easy to find and prepare. Bite by bite, they may become less of a threat to their adopted habitats.

For the hesitant, Deines offers this encouragement. “We don’t put anything on the site that we haven’t eaten ourselves,” he says. “There’s a little quality control there because none of us are sick or dead.”

As you prepare your next Notre Dame tailgate, follow these recipes to make an invasivore spread that nourishes the stomach and the mind.

Japanese Honeysuckle

Introduced as an ornamental plant because of its fragrant, pretty flowers, the Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) has become a nuisance throughout the United States because its creeping vines crowd and choke native vegetation. Its berries are poisonous, but the flowers and their nectar are sweet and can be eaten off the plant or steeped for tea.

Recipe: Hummingbird Fizz

By Sheina Sim

Ingredients:
• Honeysuckle syrup (made the same day or one day before)
• Watermelon chunks
• Club soda
• Rum
• Ice

Syrup ingredients:
• Bowl of honeysuckle flowers
• Bowl of water
• Several cups of white granulated sugar
• Squirt of lemon juice

Syrup instructions:
1. Break off the green base of the honeysuckle flower
2. Submerge flowers in water and refrigerate overnight (use more flowers to increase flavor)
3. Combine honeysuckle water with equal parts sugar (1 cup water to 1 cup sugar) in a saucepan and heat at low temperature to dissolve sugar
4. Once all the sugar is dissolved, allow to cool
5. Mix in one squeeze from a wedge of lemon to prevent crystallization

Instructions:
1. Muddle watermelon chunks at the bottom of a glass
2. Add one part honeysuckle syrup, 4 parts club soda, and a shot of rum
3. Serve over ice
4. Garnish with tiny umbrella or something else that looks nice on the rim.

Garlic Mustard

Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a European relative of cabbage, broccoli and turnips. It can be just as tasty, but the same properties tend to be off-putting to native herbivores, which has contributed to its successful invasion of the Midwest, the East Coast and the Pacific Northwest. Garlic mustard also releases chemicals into the soil that can harm neighboring plant communities. Fortunately, its roots do not grow deep so it can be yanked easily from the ground.

Recipe: Garlic Mustard and Artichoke Dip

By Sheina Sim

Ingredients:
• 4 cups chopped garlic mustard
• 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 yellow onion, diced
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• 1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
• 3/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
• 2 tablespoons chicken or vegetable bouillon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice
• 1 can quartered artichoke hearts, diced
• 1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• A few splashes of Tabasco sauce
• 3/4 cup sour cream
• 1 cup flavored broth

Mustards can be tough and fibrous. My first thought was to sauté them in oil, but that didn’t work, so I braised them in chicken broth to soften them a bit. Unfortunately, the garlic flavor and smell was lost in the process. When I make this again, I’ll add some chopped garlic to the sautéed onions.

Instructions:
1. Braise chopped garlic mustard in chicken broth until soft
2. Remove garlic mustard from braising liquid and set aside
3. Sauté onions in oil until translucent over medium-medium/low heat
4. Add butter and heat until melted
5. Mix in flour to make a roux
6. Allow the edges of the roux to brown a little
7. Slowly add broth and mix to incorporate (don’t add it too fast or the glutens won’t relax enough to thicken the broth!)
8. Once the broth is added, slowly incorporate the heavy whipping cream
9. Reduce heat to medium-low/low
10. Add remainder of the ingredients (including the braised garlic mustard) individually, making sure each one is well-incorporated.

Feral Swine

A growing nuisance in the South and Midwest, feral swine (Sus scrofa) are relatives of domestic pigs that escaped or were released as a food source during European colonization. Feral swine damage vegetation by digging and trampling. These aggressive creatures will attack other animals, including livestock, and even people. There is plenty of meat on them, though, and many natural resource managers are encouraging recreational hunters to reduce their populations.

Recipe: Pulled Feral Pork Sandwiches

Ingredients:
4 lb. feral pig shoulder roast
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 large yellow onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 ½ cups tomato ketchup
1/2 cup yellow mustard
water as needed

Instructions:
1. Coat bottom of slow cooker with vegetable oil
2. Add pork roast.
3. Stir in all ingredients, spooning mixture over pork roast
4. Add water until roast is halfway submerged, then occasionally to maintain level
5. Cook low for 6-8 hours until meat easily falls off the bone
6. While still in slow cooker, use a pair of forks to shred pork meat, removing fat as desired
7. Enjoy on a toasted bun.

This recipe is intentionally simple to allow the feral pork flavor to come through. Add or even cook in barbecue sauce as desired. Top the sandwich with coleslaw to enjoy it southern style.

Himalayan Blackberry

The Himalayan blackberry _(Rubus armeniacus)) has Armenian origins but was brought from Germany by botanist Luther Burbank in the late 19th century. Since then, it has spread across half the United States by animals who ingest the berry and deposit the seeds in their feces. The thorny bushes are a pest to hikers and herbivores but they do bear tasty fruit in mid- to late summer. They are best stopped by pulling up the seedlings.

Recipe: Himalayan blackberry custard tartlets

By Sheina Sim

Ingredients:
• 9″ pie crust (you can buy one frozen or make it yourself)
• 2 cups vanilla custard (directions follow)
• 2 cups Himalayan blackberries

Vanilla custard ingredients:
• 2/3 cup sugar
• ¾ cup evaporated milk + ¼ cup water (hot but not boiling)
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Vanilla custard instructions:
1. Combine sugar and flour
2. Cream in egg yolks
3. Slowly add hot milk while stirring over low to medium heat
4. Add butter as custard gets hot and thickens
5. Add vanilla
6. Remove from heat when it reaches desired consistency
7. Allow to cool and then chill in the refrigerator

Instructions:
1. Cut pie crust into 4-inch diameter circles
2. Bake tartlets at 450° F. for nine minutes or until golden brown
3. Allow to cool
4. When crust is cool to the touch, pour in refrigerated vanilla custard
5. Completely cover the custard with fresh and thoroughly washed Himalayan blackberries.

Tara Hunt was the summer 2011 intern at Notre Dame Magazine.

Culinary counterattack

2011-10-04T06:30:00-04:00

In theory, the invasivore idea is brilliant: Eat what you want to reduce. But is it reasonable? Should people who don’t frequently peruse edible plant and survival encyclopedias forage in the woods and try to make use of nature’s ingredients?

Despite a slight aversion to nature, I wandered into the woods at Love Creek Nature Center in Berrien Center, Michigan, in August with our team of graduate invasivores. We had called ahead asking about garlic mustard, Japanese honeysuckle and Canada goldenrod, so when we arrived, the staff had prepared a map highlighting where to find the most prominent patches of these invaders. Unfortunately, garlic mustard and honeysuckle were largely out of season, leaving behind only a few withered stragglers. Canada goldenrod, on the other hand, was rampant. We identified this plant by its leaves — alternating on the stem, lance-shaped and sharply toothed, with furry undersides and three parallel veins. After seeing one, I was able to identify them. We harvested, making sure to remove the roots so they would not spread.

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I was hesitant to put a bunch of leaves in my mouth — to the point where I watched my guides for a while to make sure no negative side effects would ensue — so I tasted just one. Peppery. Not bad.

When we returned to campus, I more eagerly took a portion of the goldenrod leaves, which taste similar to parsley or cilantro, so I could write a recipe for invasivore bruschetta. I gave the plants a thorough wash as I didn’t know who or what had browsed through them before me. The stems seemed firm and unappetizing so I just plucked the leaves for use in my recipe.

The furry leaves make Canada goldenrod easy to identify but don’t offer the most appetizing texture, so I chopped the leaves into very small pieces so eaters wouldn’t be distracted by the hairs and would still get the peppery taste. I combined them with diced tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic salt. Then I toasted some garlic bread, wrote down the number for poison control (just in case), and tasted it. It was surprisingly delicious. The Notre Dame Magazine staff partook, and at press time we’re all still alive and craving another batch. We later sampled Sheina Sim’s Himalayan blackberry custard tartlets, which were also incredibly good.

So, I’m convinced. After experiencing the entire invasivore process from bug spray to blender, I can attest that it works. I would, however, be hesitant to pick the plants alone. A few tips, then, for the more adventurous:

o Find a local nature center or preserve that is well-staffed and ask for guidance and directions.
o Study the species you want before you go and bring photos for identifying the plant.
o Be aware of pesticides and pollutants when eating foreign plants.
o Don’t eat anything you haven’t identified with 100 percent certainty.
o To learn more or to Ask the Invasivore, visit Invasivore.org.

Tara Hunt was the summer 2011 intern at Notre Dame Magazine.

Proteins: Know when to fold ’em

2011-10-04T04:00:00-04:00

Life owes a lot to origami. Seriously. It’s all about the fold. As with the ancient Japanese paper art form, newly synthesized proteins bend back on themselves to become functional, three-dimensional structures.

If the bends go as they should, the protein becomes what it is meant to become and ultimately a crane or other creature results. If not, the end product is an aggregated wad of worthless protein that can cause a malformed or diseased creature. Mis-folded proteins, for instance, have been linked to such neurodegenerative diseases as mad-cow, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as emphysema, cystic fibrosis, juvenile cataracts and cancer.

Some recent ground-breaking research by Notre Dame’s Patricia Clark and a colleague from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers new insight into this disease-causing process. Clark, who is the John Cardinal O’Hara, CSC, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Bonnie Berger, a mathematician from MIT, developed an algorithm that accurately predicts which portions of a protein will inhibit the mis-folding that leads to protein aggregation. The ND chemist conducted experimental work, while the MIT mathematician tested computational predictions based on Clark’s results.

Clark and Berger discovered experimentally and mathematically that the key to aggregation-resistant proteins is a chemical “capping structure” which occurs at the end of a properly folded protein sequence. The cap prevents the protein from doubling back on itself, interacting with copies of itself. If the cap is chemically removed, Clark found the protein quickly mis-folds and aggregates.

“It was really exciting when we found that Bonnie’s mathematical predictions held water in our experiments,” Clark says. “It means we are that much closer to figuring out what these mis-folded structures look like, and therefore how we might be able to prevent them from forming.”

John Monczunski is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magazine.

Protestant school graduates less political

2011-10-04T03:30:00-04:00

Graduates of Protestant Christian schools place a higher value on family matters and are less likely to be engaged politically than their peers attending Catholic or nonreligious private schools, according to a recent study of Christian education in North America conducted by Notre Dame sociologist David Sikkink. The survey found Protestant school graduates talk less often about politics, participate less frequently in political campaigns and are less likely to donate to political causes.

Additionally, graduates of K-12 Protestant schools are more apt to donate money and less likely to divorce. However, they tend to have less higher education and lower incomes than their Catholic and nonreligious school peers. Related to that, Catholic school administrators were more likely to rank “university” as their top priority, while Protestant school administrators placed a higher value on “family.”

The two-year study, which sampled adult graduates, ages 24 to 39, also revealed that those graduates:

— have more children than their Catholic and nonreligious peers

— participate in more relief and development service trips

— are more apt to express gratitude for what they have in life

— attend less competitive colleges.

The research study was conducted by the Notre Dame associate professor of sociology in partnership with Cardus, a public policy think tank.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magzine.

Rescuing brain cells

2011-08-25T09:00:00-04:00

About 18 months ago, while watching her 14-year-old son, Alex Mobashery, snowboarding in Harbor Springs, Michigan, Mayland Chang had one of those heart-stopping moments no parent ever wants to experience. While Alex was attempting a stunt, he lost his balance and hit his head on the ground. In that instant, the teenager joined the estimated 300,000 Americans each year who suffer a sports- or recreation-related “mild traumatic brain injury,” or concussion, as it is commonly known.

As large as that number is, it does not include other sources of concussion such as falls, auto accidents or assaults. In fact, it may be just the tip of the iceberg, even for sports-related traumatic brain injury. Leading authorities believe that up to half of all sports-related concussions go unreported. Additionally, an estimated 360,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are believed to have suffered traumatic brain injury, mainly from the shock waves caused by improvised explosive devices.

Concussion symptoms include confusion, amnesia, headache, blurred vision, seeing bright lights, dizziness, lack of motor coordination, balance difficulty, ringing in the ears, nausea and disorientation. The injury may or may not be accompanied by loss of consciousness. However, if it is, the longer a person remains unconscious, the more severe the concussion.

As the Notre Dame chemistry research professor recalls, her son didn’t hit very hard, but because he seemed dazed when he got up, she and her husband, Shahriar Mobashery, were concerned. Mobashery, who also is an ND chemistry professor, and Chang took their son to a local hospital where a CAT scan showed no hemorrhage. Back in South Bend, the family followed up with a visit to a local sports medicine physician, who confirmed that the boy had indeed suffered a concussion.

It took about three weeks for Chang’s son to return to normal. In the intervening time he was prohibited from engaging in any type of physical activity that might aggravate the injury. Rest is the only current treatment for the injury.

There is a very good reason. The brain is suspended in an insulated, liquid shock-absorbing environment encased in a hard shell: It is a delicate, finely tuned instrument that quite literally gets scrambled if it is whacked hard enough. A severe jolt can disrupt the complicated cascade of chemical reactions that regulate the brain’s function. Among other things, affected parts of the brain lose the ability to metabolize glucose, and neurons no longer transmit impulses normally. With proper rest, the brain chemistry gradually resets, and most people are back to normal, like Alex, within two to three weeks.

However, multiple concussions have been increasingly implicated in more serious long-term medical problems, such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease that affects judgment, memory, mood and impulse control. And there is concern that even multiple sub-concussive blows may lead to the disease. Boston University’s Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy has found evidence of the malady in more than 20 former NFL players, including Notre Dame All-American Dave Duerson ’83, who killed himself in February and requested in his suicide note that his family donate his brain to the study.

Chang looks on all of this with personal and professional concern. A scientist who comes from a commercial drug discovery/development background, working for Upjohn and later for Pharmacia, she recognized that certain compounds, known as MMP inhibitors, which her husband had worked on, intending them as an anti-cancer therapy, also had potential for concussion treatment.

With her pharmaceutical industry experience, Chang was aware that the necessary FDA clinical trials for a cancer drug would be lengthy and therefore extremely expensive, since cancer metastasis is a slow, oftentimes many-year process. A quicker route to FDA approval for the compound, she knew, would be to explore its potential as treatment for traumatic brain injury, and she decided to explore that avenue. Recently, NFL Charities confirmed Chang’s approach by awarding her a research grant to investigate the compound’s potential for concussion treatment.

In his earlier work, Mobashery had identified compounds that inhibit selective MMP enzymes known as gelatinases, which are important both in the spread of cancer and in stroke damage. The enzymes are involved in maintaining the integrity of the extracellular matrix that gives structure and rigidity to tissues. Most people have a low level of these particular enzymes, but high levels are produced during remodeling of the extracellular matrix that occurs in a number of pathological conditions.

Chang explains that cancer metastasis and stroke share some common elements. In cancer metastasis, gelatinases are activated to increase formation of blood vessels that allow a tumor to spread to other parts of the body. In a stroke, under low-oxygen conditions, these same enzymes are activated and can lead to brain cell death, damage to the blood-brain barrier and hemorrhage. By blocking the enzymes, the ND researchers believe the compound could protect the brain from traumatic brain injury, preventing cell death and brain damage.

While effective in animal models of stroke and traumatic brain injury, the original prototype compound, known as SBC3T, is not water soluble. Chang and her colleagues have since found a way to attach water-soluble groups to the compound, which makes intravenous drug delivery possible. That ability is important because many of the patients, whether they are concussion or stroke victims, may be unconscious.

The early results for the compound have been encouraging. In tests in a mouse model for stroke, University of Missouri scientists found that the Notre Dame compound was able to rescue 60 percent of affected brain cells when administered two hours after the injury. The hope is that it might rescue an even greater number of cells if administered early after the injury. Tests in a mouse model of traumatic brain injury are under way.

Chang has established Nupromed LLC to commercially develop the Notre Dame-patented drug compound. The company is attempting to raise $4 million to cover the cost of toxicology studies, the first step in the FDA approval process to begin clinical trials in humans.

John Monczunski and John Nagy are associate editors of Notre Dame Magazine.

Cool CO2

2011-07-06T14:42:00-04:00

Notre Dame engineering researchers have come up with a new, green take on an old air-conditioning technology that has the potential to save money and benefit the environment. Ironically, the new eco-friendly cooling system employs carbon dioxide, one of the primary greenhouse gases implicated in global warming.

In recent years there has been strong interest in CO2 as a refrigerant because its global warming potential is 1,000 times less than those currently used. However, a problem exists: Carbon dioxide requires extremely high pressure to work as a coolant, and the equipment needed to withstand those pressures is expensive.

Now a team of researchers led by Notre Dame chemical engineering Professor William Schneider may have a solution. Until now, researchers could never find an ideal co-fluid to work at lower pressure with CO2 in a cooling system. However, while working with certain compounds known as ionic liquids on research designed to remove carbon dioxide from power plant emissions, Schneider recognized these organic salts might be ideal for a CO2 based refrigeration system.

Since ionic liquids remain fluid over a broad temperature range and have an affinity for CO2, they should be excellent candidates for use in low pressure/low energy vapor-compression systems like those common in household, commercial and transportation cooling.

Using powerful computers, Schneider and his colleagues have designed ionic liquids with just the proper strength chemical bond — strong enough to bind with CO2 but not so strong as to take too much energy to break the bond. Such fine-tuning allows them to work efficiently with CO2 at lower pressure and hence lower cost.

In the refrigeration cycle, a cool, low-pressure stream of CO2 dissolved in ionic liquid takes in heat, breaking the CO2-ionic liquid bonds. This warm gas-liquid mixture is then compressed, driving up its pressure and temperature. The hot mixture ejects heat to the surroundings, allowing the CO2 to recombine with the ionic liquid. The mixture then flows through an expansion valve, decreasing the temperature further, and the mixture begins the cycle all over.

The ND researchers hope to have an ionic liquid/CO2 air conditioner up and running by the end of the year.

A cruel disease, a glimmer of hope

2011-07-06T14:42:00-04:00

Niemann-Pick Type C may be the cruelest disease on the planet afflicting children. The National Institutes of Health refers to the disorder as “childhood Alzheimer’s,” and there’s no doubt the title is deserved.

A degenerative disease that can begin in infancy and end with death in adolescence, NPC slowly cripples the body and mind of its victims. Those afflicted gradually lose all muscle tone, even the muscles that control eye movement. Eventually, children suffering from the disease are unable to swallow. In its terminal stage, Niemann-Pick patients are bedridden and suffer severe dementia.

Estimates are that 1 in 150,000 children are afflicted with the disease. Three of former Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian’s grandchildren died from the malady (see “Life in the Abyss” at magazine.nd.edu/news/14936). The Ara Parseghian Medical Research Foundation, established by the family, has partnered with Notre Dame’s Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases to search for a cure.

While no cure now exists, two drugs are being tested. Unfortunately, neither looks encouraging. One drug has limited effectiveness, slowing disease progression but not stopping it. The other has serious side effects.

In March, however, scientists from Notre Dame and Cornell reported a significant breakthrough, offering a glimmer of hope. The team of researchers, led by professors Paul Helquist and Olaf Wiest of Notre Dame and Frederick Maxfield of Cornell, had a hunch that a certain drug already approved to treat T-cell lymphoma, a relatively rare form of cancer, also might affect a protein that regulates cholesterol transport within cells.

That fact is significant since it is known that NPC causes an excessive amount of cholesterol to accumulate in cells. Cholesterol is an essential component of the cell’s membrane and a building block for steroid hormones. However, too much leads to very bad things, namely Niemann-Pick Type C.

When the scientists treated a culture of Niemann-Pick cells with the drug, a histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor, their best hopes were confirmed. Miraculously, the diseased cells reverted to normal.

NPC-damaged cells produce an abnormally small amount of the protein that regulates cholesterol transport, Helquist explains. The HDAC inhibitor drug, however, greatly increases production of that protein, and with a sufficient amount restored, the cell functions normally.

“As encouraging as these results are, this is just a first step,” Wiest cautions. “This compound works in a cell culture. But that is still a long way from an FDA-approved drug treatment. There is a lot of work yet to do, proving the concept in an animal model and other tests before it’s ready for a clinical trial.”

However, since the compound already has been approved as a cancer treatment, much of the preliminary toxicology work, such as assessing side effects, already has been done. Notre Dame researchers are pursuing a strategy of attempting to repurpose FDA-approved drugs to expedite therapies for rare and neglected diseases.

“We understand that many families desperately are seeking help for their children. And, if this compound is effective, we hope that it can be made available as soon as possible,” Wiest says. “But first, we must make sure it is safe and efficacious. We don’t want to make a bad situation worse.”

The Notre Dame chemists have developed and patented efficient processes for producing commercial quantities of the HDAC inhibitor drug and are exploring partnerships with a number of pharmaceutical firms.

Development of drug therapies for NPC is one of several goals of Notre Dame’s Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases. In 2009 Helquist and Wiest began an initiative known as the Drug Discovery Core, through which NPC researchers worldwide may collaborate on the design and synthesis of potential drug treatments. Currently there are collaborations with the medical schools of Cornell, Columbia, Tufts, Washington University and Texas Southwestern, as well as researchers at Purdue and Scripps Research Institute.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magazine.

Wonder of Wonders

2011-07-01T10:00:00-04:00

Astronomy must be the most baffling of all sciences.

In what other discipline do researchers freely admit they don’t yet understand 96 percent of their subject? According to astronomers’ best calculations, only 4 percent of the universe is made up of matter that is recognizable to us — the rest is mysterious stuff called dark matter (23 percent) and dark energy (73 percent).

And even this is hypothetical. Dark matter is an invisible element in the universe that does not emit or reflect electromagnetic radiation, but astronomers can detect its gravitational pull on stars and galaxies. Its existence was first postulated in 1934 by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky to account for discrepancies in scientists’ measurements of distant galaxies. Dark energy, which fills the empty spots of outer space, was identified only in 1998 when astronomers discovered that the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate rather than slowing down as was previously thought. Another big discovery, however, could challenge the existence of both dark energy and dark matter, setting research back to square one.

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Yet for Notre Dame astrophysicist Peter Garnavich — who played a key role in discovering dark energy — the almost maddening complexity of the subject is the appeal. “I’ve always liked to understand how things work, even when I was a kid. And when you’re that kind of person, you don’t want the easy stuff. You want to understand what no one understands.”

This is what inspires him, his colleagues on the Notre Dame astrophysics faculty and astronomers everywhere to devote their careers probing what happens light years away in places they will never experience as anything more than specks on a telescope. “Patience is very important in this work,” notes Garnavich, 52. “We’ve been waiting 300 years to see a supernova go off near us in the universe. I myself have been waiting since 4th grade.”

As baffling as it is, astronomy stirs a keen sense of adventure. Astronomers are grappling with questions so immense it makes your head spin. What is the nature of the universe? How far does it extend? How did it begin? Will it ever end?

“This kind of research gives us a different perspective on things,” Garnavich explains. “I marvel about how small the Earth really is. When I look at faraway images on the telescope I realize that each of these dots could contain many planets with people who are looking at us right now. I’d be crazy not to think about other forms of life in the universe because there are just so many possibilities out there.”

Making a trek last winter to the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) observatory in southeastern Arizona, I discovered that astronomy’s spirit of adventure is not all theoretical. Notre Dame owns a small share of the LBT (along with a consortium of German and Italian research institutes and six other U.S. universities), which is the world’s largest optical telescope with 10 times the clarity of the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s located at the peak of 10,700-foot Mount Graham alongside the Vatican Observatory, where Garnavich also conducts frequent research (see sidebar).

While distances like a billion light years can feel hopelessly abstract, I have a new appreciation for just how far 10,000 feet actually is after driving up the mountain through five ecological zones ranging from Sonoran desert where I started my ascent to spruce and Douglas fir at the top, where traces of snow could be seen on the ground. It felt like I covered at least half the distance to the stars.

I had been skeptical when Garnavich told me it would take an hour-and-a-half to cover the last 25 miles to the observatory, but it ended up taking me two-and-a-half. I climbed 7,200 vertical feet on a road consisting of one hairpin turn after another where the white line at the edge of the pavement was often no more than a few inches from a sheer cliff. But this wasn’t the most-nerve racking part of the drive. That came at the very end when I turned up a steep gravel road and was required to announce my presence through a hand-held radio given to me in the base camp at the foot of the mountain. They warned me the road was too narrow for two vehicles to meet, so I must wait at the bottom if I hear word of anyone coming down. My radio, however, did not seem to be working so I crept along the gravel with white knuckles gripping the steering wheel.

Nonetheless, I was enraptured by the magnificent vistas and ever-changing scenery out the windshield. This landscape is sacred to the San Carlos Apache and White Mountain Apache people, and I can certainly understand why.

Upon finally reaching the top, the observatory reminded me of a hideout in a James Bond movie — a hulking industrial facility in a remote location sheathed in white metal atop a huge concrete slab where a diabolical villain hatches his evil plans. Adding to the intrigue was a small fence cordoning off the whole area, which I later learned was part of an effort to keep humans from interfering with the habitat of a rare species of red squirrel found only on Mount Graham. Construction of the observatory was vigorously opposed by both native peoples and wildlife conservationists, so strict measures are enforced to protect the surrounding landscape.

Peter Garnavich greets me at the door of the towering facility (my radio worked after all!) wearing jeans and a blue “Notre Dame Physics” sweatshirt. Once inside, I notice a preponderance of oxygen tanks. “Some people get altitude sickness at this height,” he explains, adding ominously, “It’s not a pretty sight.”

He’s just out of bed after an all-nighter scanning the heavens but is game to give me a tour of the observatory, which opened in 2005 and continually adds state-of-the-art equipment. The telescope itself reinforces my James Bond fantasy. It’s four stories tall, looking like a gigantic modern sculpture with thick silver tubes sprouting out of red metal hubs. It’s precisely the spot where 007 and the villain would engage in an extended shoot-out near the end of the movie, both of them narrowly averting numerous plunges to their death.

At the heart of the telescope are two mirrors, each 8.4-meters in diameter (about 9 yards), which are large enough to easily park a Humvee on but only 1.6 millimeters thick (6/100 of an inch). At dusk when a section of the ceiling opens to the stars, this huge apparatus swivels back and forth tracking distant targets chosen by the team of astronomers upstairs.

The rest of the facility consists of a spacious kitchen with a wall of refrigerators stuffed with provisions to last a team of astronomers a week — equally proportioned between healthy choices and junk food; a recreation room outfitted with a pool table (a tradition in observatories around the world, Garnavich tells me) and a big-screen TV tuned to a sports channel; sleeping quarters that look positively monastic; and the observation room where the astronomers get down to work once the sun sets.

Think of Peter Garnavich as the lucky kid who grew up to be what he always dreamed — like many who imagined becoming baseball pitchers or ballerinas. Born into a military family, he had seen a lot of the world before landing in Bowie, Maryland, outside Washington, when he was 7. But he continued to explore new places from the vantage point of his backyard — the heavens.

While in high school he hooked up a 35mm camera to his telescope and captured an image of an exploding nova that was studied by Harvard researchers and written up in Sky & Telescope magazine (which is to astronomers what Rolling Stone is to rock musicians). That hooked him on astronomy for good.

“Sometimes I wonder what I would have done if I had not become an astronomer,” Garnavich muses. “I can’t imagine. This is even better than being a baseball player because you keep doing it after age 35.”

He majored in the subject at the University of Maryland, earned a master’s degree in physics at MIT, a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Washington and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, British Columbia, where he met his wife, Lara Arielle Phillips, who is also on the Notre Dame astrophysics faculty.

Along the way he also branched out to become a cosmologist — the study of the nature of the universe, which was once part of metaphysics but now is a subset of astronomy. Although Garnavich admits, “There’s still a lot of philosophy involved.” He developed research specialties in supernovae (stellar explosions) and gamma-ray bursts (brilliant flashes of light produced by explosions in distant galaxies).

His next post was at Harvard, where in 1994 he helped assemble the High-Z team, a collaboration of 20 astrophysicists around the world studying supernovae as a way to measure the expansion of the universe, a concept established in the work of Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble. “We had no idea we were studying dark energy when we started,” Garnavich confesses.

For decades scientists thought the universe was expanding at a decelerating rate, a belief so strongly held that Albert Einstein repudiated his own theory of the cosmological constant because it contradicted this prevailing view. But data collected by the High-Z team over several years tells a different story. Their study of far distant supernovae found that explosions were less bright than could be explained by the theory of decelerating expansion.

At first, as Garnavich pored over data from the Hubble Space Telescope, he thought there was a mistake. “It’s like you a threw a ball into the air expecting it to come back down, and instead it kept going. But when I sat down with my collaborators we saw the findings were right.”

When a competing team of scientists, the Supernova Cosmology Project, arrived at the same conclusion, it became clear to everyone that the rate of expansion in the universe was speeding up, not slowing down. This means that over the course of millions of centuries, distant galaxies will move farther and farther away from us.

In 1998, Garnavich was lead author of one of three articles that announced these shocking astronomical findings in the Astrophysical Journal. Their research points to the existence of some sort of mass energy in the vast empty stretches that comprise three-fourths of outer space, which was called dark energy.

“This work was absolutely a breakthrough — a real game-changer,” says Ohio State astronomy professor Paul Martini, who frequently shares time at the Mount Graham observatory with Garnavich. In 2007, The Gruber Prize in Cosmology was awarded jointly to the High-Z and the Supernova Cosmology Project teams. It is one of astronomy’s most prestigious awards honoring scientists “whose groundbreaking work provides new models that inspire and enable fundamental shifts in knowledge and culture.”

“Einstein provided the toolbox,” Garnavich says. “This work depended upon him and Hubble. The tools were there, they were just not being used.”

Garnavich, who has taught at Notre Dame since 2000, now explores the meaning of this discovery. In a PowerPoint he presents to his ND classes, he offers six explanations for the existence of dark energy, ranging from gravity leaking from “extra dimensions” to serious flaws in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Another possibility he lists is “something we have not thought of.” So there seems little danger that Garnavich will run out of things to understand.

“The point of science is to test things,” he says, “not just stop when you are satisfied with the results.”

Garnavich reassures us, however, that we needn’t worry about the acceleration of the universe busting the earth apart, as Woody Allen’s neurotic teenage character Alvy Singer did in the film Annie Hall, prompting his exasperated mother to declare: “Brooklyn is not expanding!”

“Woody Allen did not understand astrophysics very well. At least not as a kid,” Garnavich says. “While the universe is expanding, the Earth’s gravitational pull is strong enough to keep Brooklyn safe.” He’s quick to add, “Annie Hall is still one of my favorite movies.”

At the observatory atop Mount Graham, the pace picks up as the last rays of yellow-gold sun stream through the windows. The tapping at keyboards and shuffling of papers, which once sounded random, becomes steady and purposeful.

When blackout shades roll down over the windows around 5:30 on this December day (prime time for viewing because nights are the longest), the observation room is full. There are LBT staff technicians and astronomers from Notre Dame, Ohio State and the University of Arizona, all of whom are co-owners of the telescope, along with visiting grad students from Arizona State and the University of California-Davis — 11 males and one female. The sole woman, Erica Hesselbach, a Notre Dame post-doctoral student, remarks, “It’s not usually this unbalanced. More women have been entering the field.”

Everyone looks dressed for the weekend at a cabin — jeans, cargo pants, hiking boots, running shoes, sweat shirts, fleece jackets, ball caps — which in some ways this place is since the nearest store sits almost two hours away. Garnavich has brought a fresh-made pumpkin pie from a bakery he discovered in the small town of Willcox on the road from Tucson. Through a long career as an astronomer, he has learned that treats immeasurably aid the search for clues about dark matter, dark energy, black holes, white dwarfs, novae, quasars and other phenomenon that comprise our universe. You grow weary scrutinizing tiny images from the telescope projected on a computer screen all night long, he explains, so looking forward to a piece of pie becomes a keen motivator to keep going.

The room itself looks like an office anywhere, decked out with swivel chairs and marker boards but perhaps more computer screens than usual, some mounted overhead like in photos of the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange. The only decorations are a short string of Christmas lights and a single framed photograph of the Milky Way that shines in green, gray and purple tints. Garnavich wanders off to the kitchen and puts a frozen pizza in the oven, which burns to a crispy brown as he becomes engrossed in conversation with Hesselbach, Ohio State graduate student David Atlee and me.

Discovery doesn’t always come as a flash in the sky, he says, sometimes it’s a flash of insight. “It’s exciting when you see a gamma ray burst but a breakthrough can also come over a period of months sitting at your desk.”

After a couple of tests on the telescope, a technician announces they are ready for the first target. “Get ready!” Garnavich quips. “We’re starting to do some science.”

“Yes, now it will really start to get boring,” responds Ohio State’s Martini.

The astronomers work out the timetable of who uses the telescopes when based on how many hours they are allotted by their share of ownership. Notre Dame owns 3 percent, which means Garnavich and other Notre Dame professors are able to observe a few times a year. (His colleagues Chris Howk and Terrence Rettig will arrive just after Garnavich heads home for South Bend.) He usually books some time at the less powerful Vatican Observatory before or after his LBT slots.

Tonight Garnavich plans to focus on Supernova 2009ig, 20 million light years away. “One important aspect of studying dark energy,” he explains, “is to make supernovae better distance markers. On Earth, we have all sorts of tricks we use to measure what’s far in the distance, like looking at streetlamps — if one streetlight is dimmer than another, we know it is farther away.”

Supernovae, he says, are the streetlights of outer space, offering a sense of just how distant galaxies actually are.

This particular supernova captured Garnavich’s attention because it is relatively close and was very bright when it exploded a year earlier. “I want to see if the way it fades tells us something about how it exploded. If we know the physics of the explosion we hope to make them even better distance indicators.”

If there’s time he also hopes to explore a newfound research interest — binary stars (two stars located very close together with frequent eclipses, which reveal insights not seen otherwise).

But everyone agrees that Martini goes first to test out some new techniques in studying an enormous cluster of galaxies 12 billion light years away. “This dense region of space is 100 times more dense than usual,” he explains, “and could give us clues on how galaxies form.”

The first image from the telescope pops up on computer monitors about 6:45, and I can see astronomers’ heads bob back and forth between the screen and reams of data flowing across their laptops. But soon there’s a problem with the telescope, and the energy in the room cools down.

“The telescope is so complicated that every night something usually goes wrong — at least for a little while,” Garnavich says.

Checking his email, he announces that an amateur astronomer discovered a new supernova last night in Japan. Amateurs play a surprisingly large role in the field, according to Garnavich. “It’s a big universe out there, and there are a lot of places we aren’t looking.” In fact, he says other scientists envy the enthusiastic support astronomers enjoy from the general public. “You don’t have that in particle physics.”

By 7:45, the telescope is back in action and David Atlee reports, “The viewing is really good after all of this.” It had been cloudy the night before — a relatively rare occurrence in the Arizona desert, which is one reason why major observatories like LBT and Kitt Peak are located here — so everyone is ready to get some work done.

Martini begins scrutinizing faraway galaxies as others occasionally glance over his shoulder. Cooperation trumps competition in the observatory because there is more than enough universe for everyone to study. With new technology it may soon be possible for astronomers to scan the heavens through distant telescopes in the comfort of their offices back home, but Garnavich believes the camaraderie of the observatory is important for swapping ideas, staying up-to-date, fixing glitches and making connections in the field.

By 8:20 the machine is on the fritz again, and the technicians are videoconferencing with colleagues back in Tucson in search of a solution. Yet Garnavich, who has peered through telescopes longer than anybody in the room, remains cheery. As he drinks Earl Grey tea, he gives the impression that even a brief opportunity to gaze out toward distant horizons of outer space is not time wasted.

One by one, everyone abandons their stations and scoots their chairs into one end of the long, narrow room. At first, the assembled group awaits news that the telescope is fixed but eventually a wide-ranging discussion launches covering history, current events, football and so forth. At one point a couple of guys are poring over an Internet map of the 1924 election results (“Hey, Robert LaFollette took Wisconsin”).

When Garnavich mentions he brought a pumpkin pie, a chorus of cheers erupts. The art and science of pie making suddenly becomes the focus of conversation. A surprisingly high percentage of those present baked pumpkin pies for their families’ Thanksgiving feasts the week before, and everyone agrees the secret to success is getting the crust just right. I am especially intrigued by the grad student from UC-Davis, who details how he made his crust out of ginger snaps. This is a long way from investigating the nature of dark energy or the origin of galaxies but the same curiosity, creativity and rigor that drives scholars to study the heavens also fuels their collective passion for pie making.

Around midnight, growing anxious about my morning drive back down the mountain, I say good night and retreat to my room at the Vatican Observatory. About 5 a.m., I hear the visiting students from Arizona State and UC-Davis come in, laughing.

Later, by phone, Garnavich tells me the telescope never worked again that night, but the next “was one of the best nights ever for viewing.” He got a good look at Supernova 2009ig and observed some binary stars about 2 million light years from Earth.

Then he shares something that struck him as he hiked along a national forest trail below the peak that afternoon. “It was a beautiful day, not too cold, and I went up to a firetower to see the view,” he says. “I took a close look at the trees, at the colors, and thought about all the elements it takes to make up the universe. It’s not a simple process that got us here. We are part of a bigger universe, even if we don’t think about it much. When I look at the stars, I see wonder, awe. There is still that unsolved mystery — we don’t know how it all works.”

Jay Walljasper is the author of All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons, which features a vision of South Bend in 2035 excerpted on the Notre Dame magazine website. He is editor of OnTheCommons.org and a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler. His website is JayWalljasper.com.

The power of wiND

2011-06-01T10:00:00-04:00

A mini wind farm is about to sprout in White Field on the north edge of the ND campus this spring — if it hasn’t already. A couple of 30-foot rotor blades spinning on two 54-foot-high stands will generate about 50 kilowatts of power once the wind turbines go online.

“We are not going to light up the campus,” says Professor Thomas Corke, director of Notre Dame’s Institute for Flow Physics and Control (FlowPAC), “but what we make, the University can have.” The wind-generated electricity will be enough for about six houses, or 1/40th the power demand of the wind tunnels that are housed in FlowPAC’s White Field lab.

The turbines are being built to test rotor designs that incorporate devices known as “plasma flow actuators.” These high-tech gizmos, which look like a swatch of duct tape on the rotor blade, ionize the surrounding air. This alters the blade’s aerodynamics, which, in turn, should increase the turbine’s efficiency.

In fact, Corke and his ND colleague, Professor Robert Nelson ’64, ’66M.S. have run computer simulations that show a potential 20 percent increase in efficiency from the plasma flow actuators.

“It turns out that the single feature that determines the cost of a wind turbine is the weight of the rotor,” Corke notes. “So the larger you make them, the more power they generate, but the heavier and consequently more expensive they become.”

Plasma flow control, however, offers a handy solution to the problem. Acting like virtual flaps on a wing, the actuators modify air flow across the turbine blade. The increased efficiency allows for a smaller, lighter and, therefore, less expensive turbine. “Simply by reducing the diameter, we reduce the weight and the cost,” Corke says.

The actuators also have the potential to extend the life of the turbine. By reducing the effects of wind gusts, they lessen the aerodynamic forces that, left unchecked, can cause metal fatigue and cracks in the rotor blade.

The beauty of Corke and Nelson’s plasma actuators is that the “duct tape swatches” could easily be retrofitted onto existing wind turbines. In fact, Sorian, a start-up company headquartered at Innovation Park adjacent to campus, has partnered with Notre Dame to further develop and market the technology.

In addition to retrofit devices, Corke, Nelson and their colleagues are developing novel rotor designs that incorporate plasma flow control. For example, instead of the familiar blades, the new rotors might use cylinders.

“It takes some effort to convince people to try shapes that are aerodynamically bad, in and of themselves, but better once we add plasma flow control. This kind of outside-the-aerodynamic-box thinking is something we’ve been pushing for years,” Corke says.

Wind power accounts for about 1.5 percent of the electricity produced in the United States. By way of comparison, 33 percent of the power consumed in Germany, Spain and Denmark comes from wind.

Corke and Nelson estimate that if the United States produced 20 percent of its power from wind, as the Department of Energy proposes, and if the new turbines incorporated plasma flow control, the number of new wind turbines needed could be reduced by 50,000, saving the nation up to $15 billion.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of Notre Dame Magazine. Email him at jmonczun@nd.edu.

Astronomy Past, Present and Future at Notre Dame

2011-04-06T10:10:00-04:00

The study of astronomy at Notre Dame got a boost in 1867 when French emperor Napoleon III gave Father Joseph Carrier, CSC, a 6-inch refraction lens, which was state-of-the art technology for the time. The lens is still in use at the University’s observatory in Nieuwland Science Hall.

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But it’s no longer the big-lens-on-campus. A new two-and-a-half foot mirror lens soon will be placed in the Jordan Hall of Science, inaugurating a new era for the Notre Dame astrophysics program. The program’s 10 faculty members and hundreds of students will have handy access to distant galaxies without making the trip to the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) observatory in Arizona.

“For me this will be very valuable,” says astrophysics Professor Peter Garnavich. “I will have time to do extended projects that I can’t do in just a week down in Arizona. And this is a great opportunity for our students to get some real experience observing.”

Astrophysics Professor Terrence Rettig is most responsible for Notre Dame owning a share of the LBT, the most powerful optical telescope in the world. He was regularly doing research at the Vatican telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona when he heard in 1996 about plans to build a state-of-the-art telescope right next door. He proposed that Notre Dame invest in the $120 million project. “It was pretty adventurous for the administration to become part of such a thing, but it’s really developed our astrophysics program,” he says.

Rettig visits the LBT regularly to study disks around stars — the concentrations of gas and dust that eventually form planets, comets and meteors.