UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2006

Departments

Prerequisite

Features

Getting There from Here

Full Steam Ahead

Beyond the Bluster

Cashing in Her Chips

The Art & Science of Diversity

Twins Be Nimble

Prerequisite

Science Notebook

Baby Videos: Brainfood or Bunk?
Retailers are cooing: the fastest-growing segment of the children’s DVD market between now and 2010 is projected to be infancy to age 7. As parents buy into the hype that videos make kids smarter, “there is no evidence that baby videos enhance that world at all, and there’s some weak evidence that they might actually do harm,” says Daniel Anderson, professor of psychology. http://euryale.sbs.umass.edu/psych/index.html Anderson was awarded a $300,000 National Science Foundation www.nsf.gov/ grant to study the impact of baby videos, which have been linked to irregular napping and nighttime sleep patterns. The American Academy of Pediatrics www.aap.org/ recommends no screen time for children under two years old, and no more than one to two hours a day of high-quality education screen media for children over two. But on average, their study reports, American babies spend an hour a day watching TV. Anderson’s research supports the Academy’s recommendation. In his lab, he compared how two-year-olds’ responded to live human direction versus that given by the same person on a television screen. “The live demonstration kids under two could imitate and find things,” says Anderson. “The kids watching the video acted as if they didn’t get it.”

The Mystery of Massachusetts Moose
Conventional wisdom had it that moose prefer a cooler clime than the Bay State, yet up to 800 moose call our state home. To find out why, and how the animals’ behavior is affected by the warmer temperatures and suburban habitat, Stephen DeStefano, a wildlife bioligist with the United States Geological Survey at UMass Amherst www.umass.edu/nrc/undergraduate/wfc.html will collar about 10 moose this year. The collars use global positioning technology to record an animal’s position every two months over the course of nearly a year, answering questions about where the animals stay in winter and summer, and how they interact with a suburban environment, says DeStefano. They may also provide clues about survival and reproduction rates.

A Fat Pill?
To help combat obesity, which afflicts more than 60 million adults in the United States, scientists had been zeroing in on conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) a naturally occurring compound in dairy products and meat that was shown to block fat uptake by cells in mice and to increase their overall energy expenditure. Unfortunately, it didn’t pack quite the same punch in humans. Now, under a $260,000 grant from the American Heart Association, www.americanheart.org UMass Amherst food scientist Yeonhwa Park and her colleague, Deborah Good, veterinary and animal sciences, www.umass.edu/vasci/ are exploring the fat-fighting abilities of CLA’s chemical cousin, conjugated nonadecadienoic acid (CNA). Preliminary tests are promising, and the researchers will increase their understanding of how CNA prevents body-fat accumulation by testing mice engineered to be lazy, and consequently, fat. “It won’t be a magic pill,” says Park, “but it may turn out to be very helpful in controlling obesity in humans.”

How Now Mad Cow
As biological threats to the global food supply loom, UMass Amherst is leading research efforts to develop vaccines to prevent diseases among cattle, poultry, horses, swine, and fish. The United States Department of Agriculture is funding the $2.1 million effort. Veterinary immunologist Cynthia Baldwin heads the project involving more than 40 scientists from USDA www.usda.gov labs and universities. Baldwin says that $2 million “is a relatively small amount for such an enormous task,” but that as research progresses and succeeds, more federal dollars will be applied.

But Did It Taste Like Chicken?
UMass Amherst anthropologist www.umass.edu/anthro/ Ventura Perez has found evidence that humans on the island of Madagascar ate giant lemurs and other megafauna to extinction. Perez’s team found sharp cuts and chop marks—evidence of skinning, disarticulation, and filleting—on bones of extinct lemurs and reported their findings in the Journal of Human Evolution. “Careful scrutiny of the characteristics of the cut marks has allowed us to document butchery beyond any reasonable doubt,” says Perez. The South African island of Madagascar is known for its biodiversity, including primates endemic to the island, brightly colored geckos and chameleons, and the fossa, a carnivorous animal that looks like a cross between a puma and a dog. The arrival of humans on the island 2,000 years ago corresponds to extinction of such species as the gorilla-sized giant lemurs, pygmy hippos, and the enormous elephant bird that stood 10 feet tall, weighed more than half a ton, and laid an egg large enough to make an omelet for 150 people.

Earthquakes, Twisters, and Tidal Waves
The devastating tsunami in South Asia in late 2004 made tragically clear the need for better sensing devices to assess and warn of risk. In response, UMass Amherst leads a collaboration of universities in a project funded by a $2.4 million NSF grant to study offshore hazards that lead to deadly tidal waves. UMass Amherst will put its share of the money toward developing three tools used to study underwater sea sediment that can be a predictor of tsunamis. “We can’t build anything to stop a tsunami,” says Don DeGroot, professor of civil and environmental engineering www.ecs.umass.edu/cee/ , “but more education is a step in the right direction.”

Better weather data is being obtained via a new prototype radar unit in a 50-foot-tower on Orchard Hill. As part of the NSF-funded Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) network, www.casa.umass.edu/ the device offers an eye on what previously was a blind spot—the lower three kilometers of the atmosphere—the crucial area where storms actually form. For the first time, radar technology can follow weather disturbances with accuracy and thus effect quicker evacuations. The new radar will be deployed this spring, helping to save lives in one of Oklahoma’s tornado alleys, says computer scientist Michael Zink, head of the Technical Integration thrust of CASA.

In earthquake-prone areas, embedded sensors that monitor vibration levels could predict if a building was becoming unsafe and inform people inside, but only if information is stored properly, modeled accurately, and easily accessible, says UMass Amherst computer scientist and assistant professor Deepak Ganesan. He won a five-year $480,000 NSF CAREER grant to tackle prediction techniques and storage systems for data from such devices. Ganesan leads the Sensor Networks Research Group at UMass Amherst.

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