Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
CU Boulder “snakeman” moving on and up
Dec 13th
CU-BOULDER LAB EXPERIENCE LAUNCHES
CAREER PATH FOR GRADUATING SENIOR
CAREER PATH FOR GRADUATING SENIOR
After two years of working in a University of Colorado Boulder laboratory that recently gained international media attention for its work with snakes and heart disease, graduating senior Ryan Doptis has set his sights on becoming a research scientist.
Doptis, a molecular, cellular and developmental biology major from Las Vegas, will graduate on Dec. 16. He has worked the past two years in the laboratory of CU-Boulder Professor Leslie Leinwand, the chief scientific officer of CU’s Biofrontiers Institute.
“At CU-Boulder I’ve had a lot of opportunities when it comes to getting real-world experience,” Doptis said. “After two years of going through the molecular biology program, I decided I wanted to try lab work. And I really wanted to do meaningful research that wasn’t the same cookie-cutter experiment every semester.”
He found a perfect fit working in the laboratory of Leinwand, who is an expert in genetic heart diseases including hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the leading cause of sudden death in young athletes. Doptis’ work involves both cardiovascular and metabolic responses to eating conducted in a very unusual animal model – the Burmese python..
The research opportunity has been very fulfilling, he said, because he enjoys working with snakes and studying how they can provide insight into new ways to think about and treat some of the most serious medical problems people face, such as heart disease.
One of the things the Leinwand lab is investigating is the process by which a Burmese python’s heart size drastically increases after a gigantic meal. A python’s meal can often be 25 to 100 percent of its own body weight.
“What our research focuses on is in those few days when the snake is digesting the meal, they ramp up their metabolic rate by fortyfold,” Doptis said. “In doing that, their heart and their liver are able to get 50 to 100 percent larger than they are at a resting state. And after they digest their meal, they actually drop those organs back down to their resting size.”
A lot of the research in the lab centers around how the pythons’ heart size can change so quickly without ill side effects. Answering that question could someday lead to medical breakthroughs in the area of treating heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States. When people develop certain types of heart disease, they develop something called cardiac hypertrophy, which means their heart gets enlarged. Once that happens, it’s irreversible.
“These snakes are able to increase the size of their hearts, and then shrink the size of their hearts after every meal,” Doptis said. “We’re trying to understand the mechanism of how that can apply to possibly bring down the size of a human heart that has become enlarged.”
As part of his work in the lab, Doptis applied for and received a research grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to help fund some of the python research he was working on.
“I designed an experiment and completely conducted that experiment myself, and was funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute for that experiment,” he said. “I don’t think that’s something you can find at every university.”
Once he graduates, Doptis plans to go to graduate school and work on a doctorate degree that involves lab work.
“The experience I’ve had here will be invaluable when I enter graduate school, because I know my way around a lab, I know how to work a lot of the equipment and I’ve learned how good experimental design is done,” he said
Boulder County: GMOs, pesticides, herbicides all on the table?
Dec 5th
Cropland Policy public hearing set for Thursday
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Commissioners will hear public testimony and comment on the Cropland Policy Advisory Group’s recommendations for Boulder County Open Space croplands on Thursday evening.
What: Cropland Policy public hearing
When: Thursday, Dec. 8 at 6 p.m.
Where: Longmont Conference Center, 1850 Industrial Circle
The evening will begin with a presentation from Parks and Open Space staff. The presentation will cover existing practices and programs, the CPAG’s recommendations, and input from the Food and Agriculture Policy Council, the Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee, and Parks and Open Space staff..
The presentation will be followed by open public comment to the commissioners. Members of the public are welcome and encouraged to provide input, and comments will become a part of the public record. Speakers may sign up starting at 5 p.m. Speakers are held to a three-minute time limit and can pool time up to 10 minutes as long as everyone who signed up is present.
The CPAG, consisting of nine members appointed by the commissioners, held meetings over a nine-month period. Its policy recommendations address soil health, economic sustainability, pest management, program administration, water, livestock, recreation and natural resource protection on agricultural lands. Through a consensus process, CPAG developed more than 80 policy recommendations. Three areas failed to achieve consensus: genetically engineered crops, use of certain pesticides, and experimental farming practices.
Three public meetings have taken place: a staff presentation and public hearing on Nov. 15, FAPC deliberations on Nov. 16, and POSAC deliberations on Nov. 17. Members of the public provided input, and all comments were recorded as part of the public record.
For a copy of the Cropland Policy provided to the commissioners and information about the policy, please visit the Cropland Policy website or contact Resource Planner Jesse Rounds at 303-678-6271 or croplandpolicy@bouldercounty.org
CU Boulder researchers: You think it’s cold now?
Dec 5th
EARLY EARTH MAY HAVE BEEN PRONE TO
DEEP FREEZES, SAYS CU-BOULDER STUDY
DEEP FREEZES, SAYS CU-BOULDER STUDY
Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers who have adapted a three-dimensional, general circulation model of Earth’s climate to a time some 2.8 billion years ago when the sun was significantly fainter than present think the planet may have been more prone to catastrophic glaciation than previously believed.
The new 3-D model of the Archean Eon on Earth that lasted from about 3.8 billion years to 2.5 billion years ago, incorporates interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, land, ice and hydrological cycles, said CU-Boulder doctoral student Eric Wolf of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department. Wolf has been using the new climate model — which is based on the Community Earth System Model maintained by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder — in part to solve the “faint young sun paradox” that occurred several billion years ago when the sun’s output was only 70 to 80 percent of that today but when geologic evidence shows the climate was as warm or warmer than now..
In the past, scientists have used several types of one-dimensional climate models — none of which included clouds or dynamic sea ice — in an attempt to understand the conditions on early Earth that kept it warm and hospitable for primitive life forms. But the 1-D model most commonly used by scientists fixes Earth’s sea ice extent at one specific level through time despite periodic temperature fluctuations on the planet, said Wolf.
“The inclusion of dynamic sea ice makes it harder to keep the early Earth warm in our 3-D model,” Wolf said. “Stable, global mean temperatures below 55 degrees Fahrenheit are not possible, as the system will slowly succumb to expanding sea ice and cooling temperatures. As sea ice expands, the planet surface becomes highly reflective and less solar energy is absorbed, temperatures cool, and sea ice continues to expand.”
Wolf and CU-Boulder Professor Brian Toon are continuing to search for the heating mechanism that apparently kept Earth warm and habitable back then, as evidenced by liquid oceans and primordial life forms. While their calculations show an atmosphere containing 6 percent carbon dioxide could have done the trick by keeping the mean temperatures at 57 degrees F, geological evidence from ancient soils on early Earth indicate such high concentrations of CO2 were not present at the time.
The CU-Boulder researchers are now looking at cloud composition and formation, the hydrological cycle, movements of continental masses over time and heat transport through Earth’s system as other possible modes of keeping early Earth warm enough for liquid water to exist. Wolf gave a presentation on the subject at the annual American Geophysical Union meeting held Dec. 5-9 in San Francisco.
Toon said 1-D models essentially balance the amount of sunshine reaching the atmosphere, clouds, and Earth’s terrestrial and aquatic surfaces with the amount of “earthshine” being emitted back into the atmosphere, clouds, and space, primarily in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. “The advantage of a 3-D model is that the transport of energy across the planet and changes in all the components of the climate system can be considered in addition to the basic planetary energy balance.”
In the new 3-D model, preventing a planet-wide glaciation requires about three times more CO2 than predicted by the 1-D models, said Wolf. For all warm climate scenarios generated by the 3-D model, Earth’s mean temperature about 2.8 billion years ago was 5 to 10 degrees F warmer than the 1-D model, given the same abundance of greenhouse gases. “Nonetheless, the 3-D model indicates a roughly 55 degrees F mean temperature was still low enough to trigger a slide by early Earth into a runaway glacial event, causing what some scientists call a ‘Snowball Earth,’” said Wolf.
“The ultimate point of this study is to determine what Earth was like around the time that life arose and during the first half of the planet’s history,” said Toon. “It would have been shrouded by a reddish haze that would have been difficult to see through, and the ocean probably was a greenish color caused by dissolved iron in the oceans. It wasn’t a blue planet by any means.” By the end of the Archean Eon some 2.5 billion year ago, oxygen levels rose quickly, creating an explosion of new life on the planet, he said.
Testing the new 3-D model has required huge amounts of supercomputer computation time, said Toon, who also is affiliated with CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. A single calculation for the study run on CU-Boulder’s powerful new Janus supercomputer can take up to three months.
The CU-Boulder study was funded by a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship to Wolf as well as a grant from the NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program.
Toon will be presented with AGU’s Roger Revelle Medal for innovative work on the effects of aerosols on clouds and climate at the 2011 San Francisco meeting. The Revelle Medal is presented annually to a scientist who has shown outstanding accomplishments or contributions toward the understanding Earth’s climate systems
