College of Sciences E-newsletter

August 2007

In this issue:

Back to E-Newsletter Directory

 

UNLV'S Commitment to Renewable Energy On Display At Statewide Symposium

Renewable energy research will take center stage at UNLV August 15-16 as researchers and industry leaders from across the state gather at the Stan Fulton Building for the inaugural UNLV Energy Symposium. Organized by UNLV's Office of Strategic Energy Programs, the two-day event will for the first time assemble all of Southern Nevada's renewable energy projects, including research from UNLV, the Desert Research Institute, and a host of community and private organizations. Organizers hope to stimulate discussion related to the future of renewable and sustainable energy in Southern Nevada and forge collaborations between research and industry. The event is free and open to the public. For more information or to register, log on to http://osep.unlv.edu/ESy2007.

Back to Top



"Biotic Processes Regulating the Carbon Balance of Desert Ecosystems," ($488,774.00): DOE-PER (Department of Energy, Program for Ecosystem Research) Grant

Professor Stan Smith (School of Life Sciences),  Interim Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas was awarded $488,774.00 from DOE-PER (Department of Energy, Program for Ecosystem Research) for a two-year project, "Biotic Processes Regulating the Carbon Balance of Desert Ecosystems." This grant is part of a larger ($1,275,000) grant that includes Robert S. Nowak, University of Nevada Reno; R. Dave Evans, Washington State University and Jay A. Arnone, Desert Research Institute.

 

Abstract: The Nevada Desert FACE (Free-air CO2 enrichment) Facility, originally built with a grant from the DOE EPSCoR Program, has been operational for the past ten years.  The purpose of the long-term experiment has been to examine how an intact Mojave Desert ecosystem will respond to elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration expected to occur by the middle of this century.  This proposed three-year project will end the experiment, with Nevada researchers harvesting all plant material and soils from two-thirds of each research plot (both elevated CO2 and control plots that have been at ambient CO2 for the past ten years) in 2007, after which the elevated CO2 treatment will be turned off.  Complete plant harvesting and soil excavation will allow us to answer several key questions: (1) Did elevated CO2 increase plant production?; (2) Did elevated CO2 increase carbon storage in the soil?; and (3) Did elevated CO2 decrease soil nutrient contents, particularly nitrogen?  During the ten-year experiment, we fumigated plots with an elevated CO2 source that had a stable carbon isotope signature that was different from ambient CO2 in today's atmosphere.  We have not harvested the remaining one-third of each plot so that over the next two years we can examine the loss of this carbon label and therefore determine the turnover time of carbon in this ecosystem.  The combination of quantifying carbon storage and turnover in the ecosystem will allow us to determine if this desert system accumulated (sequestered) carbon over the 10-year period when it was exposed to elevated CO2.  Globally, the scientific community is highly interested in determining if increasing atmospheric CO2 will stimulate ecosystems to store more carbon and therefore counteract the negative effects of elevated CO2 on climate change.  This experiment will provide the first global estimate of this question for arid ecosystems.

Back to Top



Climate Kick-Started Agriculture, Geotimes, July 2, 2007

It has long been thought that agriculture got its beginnings when humans had to adjust to a change in climate in ancient Mesopotamia. Now, new research using microfossil plant data in southern Mexico is potentially linking the beginning of agriculture in the New World with a change in climate as well.

At the end of the Pleistocene period and beginning of the Holocene period, between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago, temperatures and precipitation substantially increased in the Balsas Valley region of southern Mexico, Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and colleagues wrote May 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. During this timeframe, the climate switched from dry and cool to a more seasonal climate like that of today with wet and dry seasons, says Matthew Lachniet, a geologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and co-author of the study. Lakes formed in the valleys. These newly developed lakes began to draw people.

With people came crop domestication, according to Piperno's team's dates, which put the first instances of the domestication of maize and squash in the Balsas Valley region "probably by 8,500 years ago," Piperno says. "It wasn't until that dry period ended that we saw more human modification of the landscape and crop domestication around the lakes," Lachniet says. Humans congregated around the lakes to cultivate crops, he adds.

The team's dates agree with what other researchers have recently found. Molecular biologists used a molecular clock based on genetic data to estimate that teosinte, maize's wild ancestor, was domesticated at least 9,000 years ago in Mexico. Their research also shows that populations of teosinte are genetically closest to that of maize in the Balsas Valley region.

To find indications that humans were clearing the vegetation for agricultural practices and evidence for the crop plants themselves, Piperno and her team extracted sediment cores from the edges of these lakes to search for microscopic remains of pollen, plant fossils and charcoal, which they found and dated.

"These types of studies show us the types of past environments in which domestication first arose," Lachniet says. Furthermore, he says, "it shows us the progression of agriculture and plant domestication — which is important because everyone has to eat."

As "little paleoecological or archeological work had been done in the Balsas Valley region before our study," Piperno says, the team plans to continue research in the area, and is currently studying past rainfall in the Balsas Valley to learn about the implications of prolonged droughts on human civilization. Researchers including Lachniet have previously noted apparent dry periods around the collapse of the classic Maya civilization, for example. Ongoing archeological investigations of nearby cave sites should reveal more evidence for plant domestication and how humans interacted with their environment, Lachniet adds.

teosinte patch

Courtesy of Matthew Lachniet
Dolores Piperno, seen here in a teosinte patch in Mexico's Balsas Valley, and colleagues examined soils in the region to determine when agriculture began there.

Back to Top



Understanding Materials Under High Pressure: Argonne National Laboratory Advanced Photon Source

Advanced Photon Source http://www.aps.anl.gov/Science/Highlights/2007/20070712.htm

The Argonne National Laboratory published this research update on its website.

The ability to reliably predict the bonding and interatomic forces in solids is an important topic in condensed-matter physics, and various theoretical methods have been developed and are constantly refined. For basic as well as applied science, the power of prediction provides fundamental insights into materials and paves the road to new and potentially important technologies. The atomic vibrations in a material are particularly sensitive to the bonding, and, in comparison with experiments, can provide a serious test for any theoretical description. This goal has been met by the Argonne Advanced Photon Source (APS) that reveals, for the first time, the vibrational density of states of Sn (tin) at high pressure up to 64 GPa and their accurate modeling with density functional theory calculations. (Density of states, or DOS, is the property in condensed-matter physics that quantifies how closely packed energy levels are in a physical system.)

In carrying out this research, scientists from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Los Alamos National Laboratory; East China Normal University; Wilbur Wright College; and Argonne, using the X-ray Operations and Research beamline 3-ID at the APS, have achieved remarkable agreement between measurement and theory at different very high pressures. As this is far from the common situation, it constitutes a major advance in high-pressure materials research.

Based on the DOS results, the group derived several thermodynamic quantities that are important to a fundamentally improved understanding of Sn and similar metals under extreme pressures. The established excellent agreement between theory and measurement for Sn, even at the very small excitation energies of atomic vibrations, renews our hope for the validity of theoretical methods for compounds at extremely high pressures.  

Support for this research was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Cooperative Agreement No. DEFC52-06NA26274 with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. S. P. R. and C. G. are supported by the Department of Energy under Contract No.W-7405-Eng-36. Use of the Advanced Photon Source is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. Argonne is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC.


Back to Top



"Nevada Summer Getting Warmer, " by Jeff DeLong, Reno Gazette-Journal, July 25, 2007

A recent Reno Gazette-Journal article quotes geoscience professor Steve Rowland on the topic of global warming and its implications for Nevada.

It's hot right now, but the summer of 2006 was a scorcher, with Reno topping the list in several national measurements, according to a study released Tuesday. The average temperature in Reno from June through August last year was 75.6 degrees, almost 7 degrees above the 30-year average, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group reported. The gap was the biggest measured nationally. And Reno didn't beat the heat come nighttime, the report found. The average minimum temperature last summer was 59 degrees, almost 10 degrees above the normal minimum temperature recorded from 1971 to 2000, again the biggest difference noted nationally.

It's a trend the group attributes to human-caused climate change and one that will likely produce hotter and hotter temperatures across the Silver State unless things change, members said. "We think it's part of a broader trend that shows what Reno can be expecting," said Jill Bunting, a spokeswoman for U.S. PIRG in Washington, D.C. "Global warming is rewriting the record books in Nevada and across the country."

The environmental advocacy group analyzed temperature data collected from 255 weather stations across the country to examine warming temperatures during recent years compared with historical trends.

Among its findings:

·  In 2006, Reno experienced 74 days where the temperature hit at least 90 degrees -- 21 days more than the historical average.

·  In 2006, the average temperature was 3.3 degrees above normal in Reno.

·  Between 2000 and 2006, Reno's average temperature was 3.4 degrees above the 30-year average, the second-highest reading in the nation for the period.

·  Nationally, the average temperature during the summer of 2006 was at least half a degree above the 30-year average at 82 percent of locations studied.

"I really have noticed the warmer temperatures," said lifelong Reno resident Bob Lewis, 71. He sees it in his tomatoes, which won't grow. He sees it fly fishing, which he said is "lousy" in the heat. Lewis is used to 40-degree temperature swings that cool off Reno at night during the summer. "This year it doesn't seem like we're getting that. Last year was the same," Lewis said. But Lewis doesn't believe human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for global warming. "I don't buy that at all. I think it's a cycle we go through," Lewis said.

Matt Yelle disagrees. He notices rising temperatures in Reno and said people need to take steps to reduce their influence on a changing climate. "It's been really hot," said Yelle, 20. "We need to take care of the environment and not cook ourselves." Kelly Redmond, a scientist at the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, was unavailable to comment on the report. But in an earlier interview concerning climate change, Redmond said last summer's high temperatures were part of a noticeable trend across the region.

The warmer nighttime temperatures, which produced lows in the 70s in June 2006, were particularly noteworthy, Redmond said. "That was unheard of in Reno's history until 10 or 15 years ago," Redmond said. "That's why people around here don't have air conditioning. It's supposed to be comfortable at night." In a release prepared by U.S. PIRG, University of Nevada, Las Vegas geology professor Stephen Rowland said only a small portion of the temperature increases cited in the report can be attributed to the so-called "urban heat island" effect, in which heat is retained in the concrete of urbanized areas.

"The scientific evidence of global warming is incontrovertible, and Nevada is feeling the heat more intensely than most of the rest of the U.S.," Rowland said. With Congress poised to consider global warming legislation next fall, elected leaders need to take action to reduce impacts of climate change, which include drought, wildfires and heat-related illness, activists said. "Nevadans are starting to understand that global warming is affecting us right now and our elected officials need to start making some tough choices," said Kyle Davis, policy director for the Nevada Conservation League.

Back to Top



"Bee Study Gets Money: $667,000 Grant Creates Buzz," by Shelly Mar, Rebel Yell, July 23, 2007

The bee suit dangling next to Dr. Michelle Elekonich's lab coat and graduation regalia is getting more extensive use now that she and fellow life science professor Dr. Stephen Roberts have been awarded a $667,000 grant to research honey bees. The grant, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, will span three years with a study that explores the effects of behavior and lifespan of bees. The goal of the research will be to find out if harder working bees age at a faster rate. The research is going to build upon findings by Roberts and Elekonich, which can be found in a paper titled, "Muscle biochemistry and the ontogeny of flight capacity during behavioral development in the honey bee, Apis mellifera" in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

The paper states, "When honey bees transition from hive work to foraging, their flight muscles undergo changes that allow these insects to attain the highest rates of flight muscle metabolism and power output ever recorded in the animal kingdom."

It is in these extreme conditions that Elekonich and Roberts plan to study age-specific behavior, such as gathering pollen and nectar. Researchers will track bees throughout their lifespan, which is typically around one month. The bees will be studied in their natural environment, with two separate apiaries: one on campus and another at a university owned field site. "One of the great things about bees is that we can study them in their natural environment doing their natural behaviors," Elekonich said. "So, we're seeing them in a normal level of their behavior. Their normal behavior would be extreme for people. So when they fly their metabolism is 30 times more than even a well- trained athlete." Roberts added that by studying bees in their usual state researchers gain a better understanding of which of the various aging models applies to organisms as they exist and go about their lives in nature instead of a cage in a laboratory. "This question and the power of the honey bee model system were the big selling points of the grant," he said.

"What we're also going to see is the various mechanisms to resist aging that have evolved in this extreme system," Elekonich continued. "Eventually the mechanisms do break down and the bees do age. If this works in the extreme, what can they tell us about people doing extreme things and people doing normal things?"

In preparation, Elekonich and Roberts are hiring a team of students, including a post-doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students. Currently, UNLV is a mid-level research university. With this new grant, Elekonich and Roberts hope to help in shifting the university to a top-level research institution. "Grants of this type and size are very competitive, so the grant and the resulting publications should be a bright spot for UNLV's research credibility," Roberts said. "What we're trying to do is get to the next level," Elekonich added. "I think that's a great thing."

Back to Top



"Research Sprouts From Small Seeds: Professors Add Grants From Outside To Money UNLV's President Scraped Together, " by Christina Littlefield, Las Vegas Sun, July 30, 2007

The secrets of human aging may be found in the DNA of a honey bee.

That, at least, is one of the theories behind UNLV life science professor Michelle Elekonich's research. She's part of a five-member team studying the DNA chip of honey bees for clues into why the pollinators age so fast. That in turn may lead to ways to slow that aging down - techniques that could be applied to humans , too.

The project is one of several benefiting from $50,000 seed grants being distributed by university President David Ashley to promote campus research. In one of his first major acts as president, Ashley in February set aside $1.25 million cobbled together from salary savings, end-of-year money that needed to be spent and ongoing research initiatives to provide money for professors to go after competitive grants. Professors have responded so enthusiastically that Ashley is working on another pot of money come September.

UNLV has relied on federal earmarks, particularly from the Energy and Defense departments, as it has built its research reputation, and the internal grants were designed to help professors compete on their own, Ashley and other UNLV officials said.

"This is one of the ways that UNLV is investing in research to allow us to go to the next level," said Elekonich, who already has one National Science Foundation grant in conjunction with colleague Steve Roberts. The grants allow professors to collect enough data in their area of research to prove their experiment will work and that the knowledge generated is worth additional funding from such agencies as the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. "It's just like in business, you have to have a little money to make money," Elekonich said.

About $400,000 went to collaborative research proposals like Elekonich and Roberts', $100,000 went to smaller research projects for individual professors and $750,000 went to one-shot equipment needs. Thirty-four grants were distributed in all. The collaborative grants, worth up to $50,000, were designed to encourage research projects across disciplines and across universities , said Ron Smith, interim vice president of research and graduate studies. Many of the winning grants also offer graduate research opportunities. Elekonich and Robert's grant, for instance, covers two Ph.D. students and includes collaboration with a genome expert from North Carolina State.

The individual grants, up to $10,000 a piece, were designed to help professors with travel opportunities and other smaller-scale needs. The equipment grants were to help build UNLV's research capabilities in order to pursue new research queries. "The better equipped the lab is , the more sophisticated questions we can ask and the better answers we can find the answers to," said kinesiology professor John Mercer, who received about $20,000 to purchase and operate a dual-force platform system that, like a souped-up bathroom scale, measures the force of a person's steps or a jump. The equipment is used to test the impact of running on joints and in research on how to help the elderly improve their balance. Some of the major projects funded include:

·  $50,000 for the School of Nursing to study how macrophages - immune cells - help muscles recover from injury, with the goal of developing new therapies to speed the process. The project also received $75,000 in equipment.

·  $50,000 for the College of Urban Affairs to launch a cross-disciplinary study into how to better care for juvenile delinquents suffering from mental disturbances and substance abuse.

·  $50,000 for geosciences to study how to harness geothermal power from volcanos, which includes funding a UNLV Ph.D. student in Russia and Las Vegas.

·  $50,000 for the College of Liberal Arts to study problem gambling and other addictions among multiracial/multiethnic populations.

·  $38,000 for the College of Engineering to help develop a new computer software system to more quickly and easily record and preserve national ecological data.

The money is allowing UNLV researchers to start work and go after research grants they otherwise wouldn't be able to compete for, several grant winners said. "You have to put money into it to making it happen," said Denby Brinson, a social work professor on the juvenile delinquent study. The one downfall of the research awards has been limited funds, Smith and Ashley said. Only about one-third of the applicants for the collaborative research grants could be funded before the money ran out, which showed both the effect of the funding and the need, said Robin Toles, director of research services.

Back to Top



Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program – Poster Session

UNLV researchers are addressing critical homeland security issues this summer as part of a unique research program The UNLV summer undergraduate research experience will culminate in a poster session, to be held in the Grand Hall of the Tam Alumni Center on Thursday, August 9, 2007, from 2:00 -5:00 p.m.

 

Approximately 40 undergraduates, including UNLV students and a select group of undergraduates from colleges and universities across the nation will present posters that detail summer research projects conducted with UNLV faculty. The students, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), and others participated in research projects with UNLV faculty across campus.

 

The poster presentations are free and open to the public.

Back to Top



Nevada Friends of Paleontology Meeting and Lecture

The Nevada Friends of Paleontology will meet at the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society located at 700 Twin Lakes Drive in Las Vegas on August 26th at 1:00 pm.  Dave Einstein will present a talk, ""What Jurassic Park Got Wrong."  The talk is free to the public. Eisenstein runs a company called Cap'n Dave's Dinosaurs and has offered public lectures on paleontology topics since 2001. His delivery and content is "kid-friendly."

Back to Top



Math Student Paper Wins Award

The Section on Bayesian Statistical Science of the American Statistical Association has selected a paper written by incoming assistant professor of mathematics, Anton Westveld, (University of Washington) entitled  "A Bayesian Mixed Effect Model for Longitudinal Social Network Data" for its top award.

 

 

Back to Top



School of Life Sciences Grants: Inside Higher Education, Las Vegas Review Journal, by Christina Littlefield, July 6, 2007

UNLV life science professors have recently racked up five grants totaling more than $2.6 million. The competitive awards come predominantly from the National Science Foundation, and are a part of UNLV's overall efforts to advance as a research university. The research projects focus on the effect of the desert environment on specific organisms and evaluating the various life processes of certain insects to better understand how humans function. Professors Michelle Elekonich and Stephen Roberts, for instance, are studying how the work habits of honey bees affect their life span.

Back to Top



Upcoming Seminars

The College of Sciences has established a listserve to better publicize and promote scientific seminars offered throughout the academic year. For more information on upcoming seminars and to subscribe to the listserve, please visit: http://cmse.unlv.edu/seminar/.

Back to Top



Submit Your News Stories

The College of Sciences E-Newsletter is published on or about the first of each month. Please submit news items via email by the fifteenth of each month, for consideration. You may send your submissions to: Bill Brown, Director of Development william.brown@unlv.edu.

Back to Top


Related Links


Get Adobe Reader