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Western research shines at Fallona Family Interdisciplinary Science Lecture

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Discovering new molecules in space. Creating a salmonella vaccine for poultry – from plants. Analyzing how fear impacts animal brains in the long term. 

Three wildly distinct Western research projects, but all with a central connection: a focus on bringing together scientists from multiple fields to drive solutions.

PhD candidates presented a series of collaborative projects on Jan. 16 at the Fallona Family Interdisciplinary Science Award and Lecture, ahead of a keynote from Western neuroscientist Jörn Diedrichsen.

“This is a way to empower students and researchers to explore the possibilities of what can happen when they work together with other science disciplines,” Jeff Hutter, acting dean of the Faculty of Science, said of the event. 

“It’s become even more critical as things continue to evolve in the field of science. Over the last decade, we’ve seen time and again the importance of interdisciplinary work in the fights against COVID-19, climate change, the uptake of artificial intelligence and more, with researchers from various fields coming together to create solutions from different angles.” 

The event is made possible by Mary Catherine Fallona, BSc‘61, MSc‘65 and James Fallona, BSc‘58, MSc‘65, who come from a nine-member family with a combined 15 degrees from Western. The siblings are so dedicated to interdisciplinary science – and the belief that collaboration between researchers can enrich their work, provide inspiration and drive new ideas – they donated over $100,000 to create the Fallona Family Interdisciplinary Science Award and Symposium Fund. 

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Charmi Bhatt, a PhD candidate in astronomy, won the student presentation portion of this year’s award and lecture, which included a three-minute talk on each interdisciplinary research project.

Bhatt studies molecules in space using data from telescopes. 

“Have you ever wondered how life started on earth? Think about this: We are made of carbon . . . All the carbon we have in our bodies was made inside stars. So, what happened in between?” she said after stepping up to the podium to begin her talk.

Bhatt also works at the Cronyn Observatory, a great fit given her love of sharing about space. She’s passionate about science communication and outreach, writing blogs to explain concepts like weather forecasts, blood types and asteroids using simple language and fun metaphors. 

She uses telescopes, including the massive James Webb Space Telescope, to observe the spectrum of light given off by atoms and molecules in space. That can give key details about its properties.

“Every time we find a new molecule, it just blows my mind, because it shows how wild and different physics and chemistry in space can be, (compared to) what we know on Earth.” – Charmi Bhatt, PhD candidate in astronomy

Interdisciplinary work is key in her field.

“As astronomers, we cannot do this all alone and I like how interdisciplinary this research is. We often work with chemists; they tell us what chemical reactions can occur in space, what cannot. We also work with computer scientists; they can develop models for us to simulate how the signals from molecules will look,” Bhatt said. 

“With this team effort, we are much closer to figuring out how we formed the building blocks of life in space.” 

As the top presenter, Bhatt won $500 with her talk. She called the experience “exhilarating and unique.”

It was my first shot at presenting research to scholars from different fields, and the interesting discussions that followed were truly enriching. Winning first place is both a humbling and inspiring, fueling my passion for interdisciplinary research and effective science communication. The outstanding presentations from fellow participants were also a source of great learning and inspiration,” Bhatt said. 

Salmonella solutions  

Biology PhD candidate Carly Charron shared her journey to create a plant-based salmonella vaccine for poultry. Her work to develop an easy-to-provide treatment could reduce contamination of crops and reduce the safety concerns associated with salmonella outbreaks. 

“There is a really big need to develop effective control measures to prevent salmonella,” Charron said.  

“The goal of my project is to develop an edible, plant-based salmonella vaccine that would be safer, more effective and cheaper than those currently available.” 

Charron is using a powder made from leaves so the vaccine can be fed to one-day and two-week-old broiler chickens, along with their regular food, to prevent salmonella in poultry and limit the risk of foodborne illness in humans as a result. 

There are major economic and health implications for both farmers and the public, since poultry can harbour large loads of salmonella without displaying symptoms. That makes it easy for the bacteria to quickly spread throughout an entire flock. 

Initial trials using a protein nanoparticle in mice induced a very strong immune response. A feeding trial is planned for chickens this summer.  

 

Enduring effects of animal fear 

Imagine trying to find a meal while avoiding becoming one. 

“In the animal kingdom, it’s necessary to balance the fear of being eaten with the need to remember how to survive,” Lauren Witterick, a PhD candidate in biology, told the crowd gathered for the Fallona Family Interdisciplinary Science Award and Lecture. 

Witterick studies the impact of fear on the brains of birds and wild voles, based on templates from research of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in humans.  

Her work, using the sounds of natural predators like hawks and owls, examined birds in the lab as well as in outdoor aviaries that model a natural environment, and voles in their typical wild habitat. 

“This suggests the long-lasting changes in response to fear that we call PTSD may have evolved to help us remember how we survived the last life-threatening event, so we could do it again the next time something tried to eat us,” Witterick said. 

“We have found that the fear of predators can induce long-lasting changes in the brain and behaviour, suggesting fear memories may be a sign of a healthy mind, and have advantages for survival.” 

Witterick, who is supervised by biology professor Liana Zanette, said the project allows her to combine two areas of interest: ecology and biomedicine.  

 

Fallona family legacy 

Diedrichsen, the 2023 Fallona Family Interdisciplinary Science Prize winner, spoke about the power of the cerebellum, an understudied part of the brain. 

He joked about its nickname – the “little brain” – and location within the brain, tucked under the cerebrum. 

“Its subdued basement location may be one of the reasons why it’s often ignored,” Diedrichsen said. 

The Fallona Family Interdisciplinary Science Award is presented each year to a scientist involved in interdisciplinary work who makes a positive impact in the world. 

Diedrichsen, also the Western Research Chair for Motor Control and Computational Neuroscience, was recently awarded $1 million to create a growth chart for the human cerebellum over the course of a lifetime. 

Mary Catherine Fallona, who studied both physics and chemistry at Western, said in a 2017 interview with Western News that the interdisciplinary research at Western amazes the Fallona family every year.

In the 1960s, Mary Catherine investigated a new kind of mold with antibiotic properties. More than 50 years later, she shared her enthusiasm for breaking down barriers within scientific fields.

“They’re going to save the world. It’s this sort of research and development these students are producing that is going to make a difference,” Mary Catherine said. 

“People used to say, ‘What’s with all this highfalutin research? What’s it good for?’ Well, you never know. You don’t start a project knowing all the answers. That’s what research is all about; you have got to find the answers.” 

 

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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