Universities Go to Space: NASA Announces Early Career Faculty Space Tech Research Grants

David E. Steitz

Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1730

david.steitz@nasa.gov

WASHINGTON -- NASA has announced the selection of 10 research efforts from the agency's inaugural Space Technology Research Opportunities for Early Career Faculty solicitation. NASA will provide grants of as much as $200,000 per year for as long as three years in support of these faculty and their research in specific, high-priority technology areas.

The selected faculty will conduct research in areas closely aligned with NASA's Space Technology Roadmaps and priorities identified by the National Research Council. These priorities include extending and sustaining human activities beyond low Earth orbit, exploring the evolution of the solar system and potential for life elsewhere, and expanding our understanding of Earth and the universe.

"It's an honor to announce this outstanding group of early career faculty researchers, representing some of the most talented new faculty from the best institutions of higher learning in America," said Michael Gazarik, director of NASA's Space Technology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "NASA will benefit from the work these faculty researchers conduct in unique, disruptive or transformational space technologies or concepts, while strengthening America's continued global leadership in the new technology economy."

The selected Early Career Faculty researchers are:

--Chih-Hao Chang, North Carolina State University, Raleigh

--Nicolaus Correll, University of Colorado at Boulder

--Julia Greer, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena

--Mary Lind, Arizona State University, Tempe

--Michele Manuel, University of Florida, Gainesville

--Jeremy Munday, University of Maryland, College Park

--Marco Pavone, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

--Mina Raies-Zadeh, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

--Debbie Senesky, Stanford University

--Wei-Chuan Shih, University of Houston

Newly-selected early career efforts will develop technologies to automate the production of food in space and investigate and test advanced wastewater recovery technologies. These efforts also will look to develop robust timekeeping technologies that enable more precise landing and autonomous rendezvous in space, and formulate new ultra-lightweight materials with properties that can be tailored.

NASA's Early Career Faculty efforts are an element of the agency's Space Technology Research Grants Program. It is designed to accelerate the development of technologies originating from academia that support the future science and exploration needs of NASA, other government agencies and the commercial space sector.

For more information about NASA's Space Technology Grants Program, and a listing of the titles of the selected research topics, visit http://go.usa.gov/P31.

The Space Technology Research Grants Program is a part of NASA's Space Technology Program, dedicated to innovating, developing, testing, and flying hardware for use in NASA's future science and exploration missions. NASA's technology investments provide cutting-edge solutions for our nation's future.

For more information about the Space Technology Program and the crosscutting space technology areas of interest to NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/oct.

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NSF I-Corps Celebrates First Year Bridging University Researchers with Entrepreneurs

Anniversary highlights accomplishments of nearly 100 teams and the announcement of the addition of two I-Corps National Innovation Network nodes

In July 2011, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the Innovation Corps (I-Corps), a program to broaden the impact of select, NSF-funded, basic-research projects by preparing scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory.

Leveraging experience and guidance from established entrepreneurs and a targeted curriculum, I-Corps grantees learn to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research.

Now, one year into its three-year pilot phase, the I-Corps program has reached pivotal milestones. Several teams already are receiving public and private follow-on investment and participants have built a novel I-Corps Mentor Network that connects experts from the academic and entrepreneurial communities.

"NSF launched Innovation Corps to leverage productive public-private partnerships and extend the impact of fundamental research discoveries," says NSF Director Subra Suresh. "I-Corps has already had an impact beyond our initial expectations and inspired the research and business communities to collaborate in new ways. It is a model that can be transferred to other areas as well, and we are grateful to all the stakeholders for their support and participation."

Nearly 100 teams--composed of academic researchers, student entrepreneurs (undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs) and business mentors--participated in the six-month I-Corps program.

The curriculum is a hypothesis-based approach to assessing technological readiness that combines two, site-based short courses, extensive online coaching and hands-on outreach to potential customers. I-Corps merges the structured coursework with guidance from NSF program officers and leading entrepreneurs, who committed their time to the program.

Several I-Corps teams have received NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants, enabling them to develop companies based on what they have learned from the program. In the coming year, NSF hopes to expand I-Corps to an additional 200 teams of researchers and their business mentors.

"Academic researchers already have many skills valuable for success in business, such as critical thinking, teamwork and an ability to move in a new direction and learn when a hypothesis proves false," says Errol Arkilic, NSF program director for I-Corps. "The NSF I-Corps builds upon that expertise, introducing researchers to the business community and teaching them to seek, and speak to, the needs of potential customers."

As an extension of the I-Corps program's success and as a mechanism to broaden the geographic reach of the effort, NSF will expand the network of nodes that serve as teaching sites for the hands-on curriculum.

The I-Corps node at Stanford University now will join one at Georgia Tech and one at the University of Michigan. Additionally, NSF is now soliciting proposals for new nodes, all of which will serve their regional community as innovation supporting resources and act as focal points for expanding the national I-Corps network.

"I-Corps is an innovation model that demonstrates the continued strength of the American entrepreneurial spirit," says Dedric Carter, NSF senior advisor for Strategic Initiatives. "Building on NSF's 60-plus year legacy of investing in basic research and spawning innovation, I-Corps embodies many of the key elements for entrepreneurial achievement and illustrates why our nation is still the world-leader for start-up success."

The National Science Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Deshpande Foundation support the Innovation Corps. For more information, see NSF's I-Corps webpage.

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Early Spring Drives Butterfly Population Declines

Early snowmelt caused by climate change in the Colorado Rocky Mountains snowballs into two chains of events: a decrease in the number of flowers, which, in turn, decreases available nectar. The result is decline in a population of the Mormon Fritillary butterfly, Speyeria mormonia.

Using long-term data on date of snowmelt, butterfly population sizes and flower numbers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Carol Boggs, a biologist at Stanford University, and colleagues uncovered multiple effects of early snowmelt on the growth rate of an insect population.

"Predicting effects of climate change on organisms' population sizes will be difficult in some cases due to lack of knowledge of the species' biology," said Boggs, lead author of a paper reporting the results online in this week's journal Ecology Letters.

Taking into account the butterfly's life cycle and the factors determining egg production was important to the research.

Butterflies lay eggs (then die) in their first summer; the caterpillars from those eggs over-winter without eating and develop into adults in the second summer.

In laboratory experiments, the amount of nectar a female butterfly ate determined the number of eggs she laid. This suggested that flower availability might be important to changes in population size.

Early snowmelt in the first year leads to lower availability of the butterfly's preferred flower species, a result of newly developing plants being exposed to early-season frosts that kill flower buds.

The ecologists showed that reduced flower--and therefore nectar--availability per butterfly adversely affected butterfly population growth rate.

Early snowmelt in the second year of the butterfly life cycle worsened the effect, probably through direct killing of caterpillars during early-season frosts.

The combined effects of snowmelt in the two consecutive years explained more than four-fifths of the variation in population growth rate.

"Because species in natural communities are interconnected, the effects of climate change on any single species can easily be underestimated," said Saran Twombly, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research.

"This study combines long-term, data models, and an understanding of species interactions to underscore the complex effects climate change has on natural populations."

"It's very unusual for research to uncover a simple mechanism that can explain almost all the variation in growth rate of an insect population," said David Inouye, a biologist at the University of Maryland and co-author of the paper.

Indeed, "one climate parameter can have multiple effects on an organism's population growth," Boggs said. "This was previously not recognized for species such as butterflies that live for only one year.

"We can already predict that this coming summer will be a difficult one for the butterflies," she said, "because the very low snowpack in the mountains this winter makes it likely that there will be significant frost damage."

"Long-term studies such as ours are important to understanding the 'ecology of place,' and the effects of weather and possible climate change on population numbers," said Inouye.

"This research is critical to assessing the broader effects of weather on an ever-changing Earth," he said. "By facilitating long-term studies, field stations such as the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory are an invaluable asset."

Stanford University's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education also funded the work.

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How the Slime Mold Gets Organized

The so-called cellular slime mold, a unicellular organism that may transition into a multicellular organism under stress, has just been found to have a tissue structure that was previously thought to exist only in more sophisticated animals. What's more, two proteins that are needed by the slime mold to form this structure are similar to those that perform the same function in more sophistical animals.

Shortly after an animal embryo forms, it develops a single layer of cells that, shaped like a hollow ball, is empty at its center. Acting as a kind of "man behind the curtain" that directs these cells to organize into this hollow formation are several proteins that help each cell touch its neighbors but keep its top surface exposed to the formation's empty interior.

Even after animals grow beyond the embryo stage, the cells in many organs of their bodies maintain this type of hollow structure. These organs include those in the digestive tracts of animals, which feature a layer of cells, called epithelial cells, that face inward to form a hollow structure and are shaped asymmetrically to give organs their directionality. For example, the asymmetric epithelial cells of animal intestines face inward to form a hollow structure through which nutrients are absorbed. Likewise, the asymmetric epithelial cells of animal glands, such as salivary and endocrine glands, also face inward to form a hollow structure. But instead of absorbing substances as do the epithelial cells of animal intestines, these glandular epithelial cells secrete into their hollow structure substances that they produce.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Daniel Dickinson, W. James Nelson and William Weis--all of Stanford University--took a careful look at the final, mature stage of slime mold development under a high-powered microscope. They report their results in the journal Science, March 11, 2011.

The slime mold spends most of its life as a single-celled organism, living in soil and preying on bacteria. However when food runs short, thousands of slime mold cells aggregate to form a mound. They then grow into a fruiting body--which is a stalk, a few millimeters tall, whose top peeks over the surface of the ground and holds spores. The researchers found that the organization and directionality of cells in this top part of the extending stalk are surprisingly similar to those of the epithelial cells of some organs of higher animals.

Dickinson and his colleagues also discovered that in order for the cells in the top of the slime mold's stalk to organize into an epithelium, they need analogues to two of the many proteins that are needed by animal cells to organize into an epithelium. Called alpha-catenin and beta-catenin, these slime mold analogues are genetically and biochemically similar to their animal versions. And when the researchers removed these analogues from the cells of slime molds, they lost their ability to organize correctly.

In addition to requiring proteins that are similar to those required by some animal epithelial tissues, the slime mold's epithelium tissue behaves similarly to the epithelial tissue of some animals--it is secretory. It secretes proteins that coat the stalk of the fruiting body and give it the rigidity it needs to send its spores out onto the ground in search of new food.

"We don't know whether the ancient ancestor of slime molds and animals was actually able to form an epithelium," says Dickinson, "but it must have had alpha-catenin and beta-catenin, and we suspect that these proteins had some role in organizing cells."

-NSF-

Justice Department Convenes First Meeting of New Science Advisory Board

WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs’ (OJP) newly created Science Advisory Board convened its first meeting today in Washington, D.C.   Created last year, the board is charged with providing OJP with guidance and recommendations for research, statistics and grant programs, ensuring the programs and activities are scientifically sound and pertinent to policymakers and practitioners.

Today’s meeting provided the board’s newly appointed members with information about OJP’s mission and goals, and how their participation will enhance the overall impact and performance of OJP’s activities in criminal and juvenile justice.   In Fiscal Year 2010, OJP awarded nearly 5,000 grants totaling $2.6 billion to the criminal and juvenile justice field.   This funding will be used for research and evaluation programs designed to encourage innovative approaches to prevent and control crime, to assist victims, and to increase the capacity of state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies.

“The Science Advisory Board will play a critical role in institutionalizing the protection of science at the Department of Justice,” said Laurie O. Robinson, OJP’s Assistant Attorney General.   “The board’s members will provide valuable input and guidance to ensure adherence to the highest levels of scientific rigor, while serving as a bridge between research and practice in the criminal justice fields.”

In November 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the 18 board’s members – experts and scholars in criminology, statistics, sociology and practitioners in the criminal and juvenile justice fields.   The members are:

Chair: Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D., The H. John Heinz III College, Carnegie Mellon University.    Dr. Blumstein is a previous winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and serves as the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon Heinz College.

William J. Bratton, Chairman, Altegrity Risk International.   Mr. Bratton most recently served as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Andrea J. Cabral, Sheriff, Suffolk County, Mass.   Sheriff Cabral was elected as the 30th Sheriff of Suffolk County and she is the first female in the commonwealth’s history to hold the position.

Frank Cullen, Ph.D., Distinguished Research Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati.    Dr. Cullen is the past editor of Justice Quarterly and Journal of Crime and Justice and was president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Tony Fabelo, Ph.D., Director of Research, Council of State Governments Justice Center.    Dr. Fabelo was a member of the National Research Council panel of the National Academy of Sciences that issued two national reports in 2000 and 2001 on juvenile crime and juvenile justice.

James M. Lepkowski, Ph.D., Chair, Program in Survey Methodology, University of Michigan.    Dr. Lepkowski is Senior Research Scientist at the Survey Research Center and Associate Professor of Bio-statistics at the University of Michigan.

Alan I. Leshner, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).    Dr. Leshner has been the chief executive officer of the AAAS and Executive Publisher of the journal, Science, since December 2001.

Mark Lipsey, Ph.D., Director, Peabody Research Institute, Vanderbilt University.

Dr. Lipsey is the director of the Peabody Research Institute and his research and teaching interests include public policy, program evaluation and social intervention with an emphasis on programs for children and youth.

Colin Loftin, Ph.D., School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, State University of New York.    Dr. Loftin is co-director of the Violence Research Group, a research collaboration with colleagues at the University at Albany and the University of Maryland that conducts research on the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence.

The Honorable Theodore A. McKee, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.   Prior to his appointment to the bench, Judge McKee served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney where he prosecuted cases of public corruption, police brutality and civil rights violations.

Tracey L. Meares, J.D., Deputy Dean and Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law, Yale University.   Professor Meares’ research and teaching interests center on criminal procedure and criminal law policy, with a particular emphasis on empirical investigation of these subjects.

Edward P. Mulvey, Ph.D., Director, Law & Psychiatry Research, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.   Dr. Mulvey is a fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society.

Joan Petersilia, Ph.D., Faculty Co-director, Stanford Criminal Justice Center

Dr. Petersilia is the author of 11 books about crime and public policy and has conducted research about parole reform, prisoner reintegration, and sentencing policy.

Joycelyn Pollock, Ph.D., Department of Criminal Justice, Texas State University.    Dr. Pollock began her career in criminal justice as a probation and parole officer in the state of Washington.   Her primary research areas include prisons, women in the system (as professionals, offenders and victims) and legal topics.

Richard Rosenfeld, Ph.D., Professor, Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri.   Dr. Rosenfeld is the Curators Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.   He recently served as the President of the American Society of Criminology.   Dr. Rosenfeld is the co-author with Steven Messner of Crime and the American Dream, now in its fourth edition.   

Elizabeth A. Stasny, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics and Vice Chair of Graduate Studies in Statistics and Bio-Statistics, Ohio State University .   Dr. Stasny has served on the editor boards of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and Survey Methodology.    She is a recognized expert in dealing with missing data and other response errors in surveys.

Robert J. Sampson, Ph.D., Professor of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Harvard University .   Dr. Sampson is the 2011 co-recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology.   He and Dr. John H. Laub, Director of the National Institute of Justice, are joint winners for their work on understanding how and why criminals stop committing crime.  Dr. Sampson currently is on a one-year research sabbatical from Harvard University to the Russell Sage Foundation.    His research interests center on crime and violence, the life course, neighborhood effects and the sociology of the modern city.

David Weisburd, Ph.D., Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, Hebrew University and George Mason University.    Dr. Weisburd is the 2010 winner of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and one of the early proponents of place-based experimental research in criminology.

NASA Discovers Asteroid Delivered Assortment of Meteorites

Dwayne Brown

Headquarters, Washington                                   

 

Rachel Hoover                                              

Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.                         

WASHINGTON -- An international team of scientists studying remnants of an asteroid that crashed into the Nubian Desert in October 2008 discovered it contained at least 10 different types of meteorites. Some of them contained chemicals that form the building blocks of life on Earth, and those chemicals were spread through all parts of the asteroid by collisions.

Chemists at Stanford University found that different meteorite types share the same distinct fingerprint of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These complex organic molecules are distributed throughout the galaxy and form on Earth from incomplete combustion.

A research team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., found amino acids in strongly heated fragments of the asteroid, where all such molecules should have been destroyed. Both PAHs and amino acids are considered building blocks of life.

Before landing on Earth, the 13-foot asteroid was detected by a telescope from the NASA-sponsored Catalina Sky Survey based at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Hours prior to its demise, astronomers and scientists around the world tracked and scanned the asteroid. It was the first time a celestial object was observed prior to entering Earth's atmosphere.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., created a search grid and impact target area. The data helped Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and the SETI Institute of Mountain View, Calif., guide a recovery team from the University of Khartoum in Sudan to search the desert landscape. During four expeditions, approximately 150 students recovered nearly 600 meteorite fragments weighing a total of more than 23 pounds.

"Right from the start, the students were surprised to find so much diversity in meteorite texture and hue," said Muawia Shaddad, an astronomer at the University of Khartoum, who led the search effort. "We estimate the asteroid initially weighed about 59 tons, of which about 86 pounds survived the explosion high in the atmosphere."

Subsequently, scientists determined most of the fragments are a rare type of meteorite called ureilites. Less than 10 of the nearly 1,000 known meteorites are ureilites. The recovery team made history when they found the first-ever freshly fallen mixed-composition, or polymict ureilite. The majority of the remaining fragments are similar to the more common types of meteorites called chondrites.

Other Ames researchers showed the ureilite fragments contained widely varying amounts of the minerals called olivine and pyroxene. Carnegie Institute of Washington researchers found these minerals have the full range of oxygen atom signatures detected in previous ureilites. Scientists believe this is evidence all ureilites originated from the same source, called the ureilite parent body. Astronomers theorize the parent body experienced a giant collision approximately 4.5 billion years ago and caused iron-rich minerals to smelt into metallic iron. However, the olivine and pyroxene didn't melt, which allowed the oxygen atoms in them to stay in the same arrangement as when they first formed.

Researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston were able to deduce that much of the ureilite parent body was reduced to fragments measuring 30 to 300 feet during this giant collision. After the catastrophic collision, scientists believe the material that ended up making 2008 TC3 had a long history of violent collisions and impacts. These later collisions ground the fragments down into the smaller sand grain-sized pieces that gathered loosely together with many voids.

Researchers believe the amino acids were delivered to 2008 TC3 during the later impacts, or formed directly from trapped gases as the asteroid cooled following the giant collision. Other non-ureilite types of meteorites also became part of the asteroid. To date, ten different meteorite types have been identified, accounting for 20-30 percent of the asteroid's recovered remains.

"Asteroids have just become a lot more interesting," Jenniskens said. "We were surprised to find that not all of the meteorites we recovered were the same, even though we are certain they came from the same asteroid."

Astronomers have known asteroids orbiting the sun frequently are broken and reassembled during collisions, but until now they thought little mixing occurred because asteroids, or impactors that broke them apart, are usually very small. The research is featured in 20 papers published this week in an issue of the Meteoritical Society's journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. For information about NASA and agency programs, visit http://www.nasa.gov.

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