The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.

RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.

“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.

Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today, I asked Stephanie Willen Brown to answer a few questions.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m Stephanie Willen Brown, aka CogSciLibrarian living in the Triangle area in North Carolina. I’ve been a librarian since 1996, and I started calling myself the CogSciLibrarian in 2004, when I was the librarian for the School of Cognitive Science at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. I started the blog as a way of sharing cool cognitive science stories and books that I thought my colleagues would enjoy.

My scientific background is limited to that of a librarian, supporting faculty and students working in cognitive science, communications, and psychology over the years. I’d grown up intimidated by math and science, but cognitive / brain / neuroscience is so interesting AND there is so much good, accessible writing about it that I have become a fan.

My current reading interests include the effect of mindfulness on the brain, the development and use of language, and concussions in NFL and other athletes.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’m thrilled to be working at my dream job, as director of the Park Library at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It incorporates many of my interests, such as library science, journalism, marketing, and advertising. I am a consumer of mass media, and I love to be around academics who are studying various aspects mass communication.

My first love is helping students and colleagues find resources that will enhance their research, and the work is double-plus good when it involves subject matter I find interesting as well as amazing library colleagues at the UNC Libraries.

I do miss supporting cognitive and communication science, as I don’t have much interaction with my all-time favorite database PsycINFO. It’s got great content and robust metadata (did you know you could limit your search to age group of subjects studied? Or that you can limit results to just empirical studies or literature reviews?), though it’s not the go-to database of choice for mass communication.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Science needs good public relations right now, and I agree with @ErinBiba’s essay in the May issue of Wired “Why Science Needs to Step Up Its PR Game.” I’d like to play a small part in the merger of science and PR by training public relations professionals to do good research and generally supporting their academic endeavors. Libraries and news* (newspapers, news outlets, etc.) need good public relations too, but that’s for another post.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

One of the great things about my job is that I feel empowered – even obligated! – to read about social networking and participate in various social networks professionally and personally. I promote the Park Library via Twitter (@JoMCParkLib and Facebook and have dabbled in FriendFeed.

I believe we in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication should be teaching our students to use social networks in their professional work, so I think of myself as modeling good professional use of social networks.

I tweet as @CogSciLibrarian as well, which is where I keep up with my science buddies and science news.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I discovered science blogs years ago as I began my own blog, though I read science librarian blogs such as John Dupuis’ Confessions of a Science Librarian more than practicing scientist blogs. I met science documentarian Kerstin Hoppenhaus at ScienceOnline2010 and really enjoy her More Than Honey blog.

I’ve since migrated to Twitter for most of my online / science interactions, and I follow some great science folks there, including @SteveSilberman , @tdelene (DeLene Beeland), @VaughanBell (contributor to Mind Hacks), and my favorite psychology radio show @allinthemind (Australia’s Natasha Mitchell).

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

Gosh, I loved #scio10! It was great to be exposed to so much science in a casual, friendly environment, and I enjoyed spending time with like-minded librarians like Christina Pikas, John Dupuis, and Bonnie Swoger . I was also happy to meet Irtiqa’s Salman Hameed and Tom Linden’s Master’s students in UNC’s Program in Medical & Science Journalism. There were many more as well, but the most amazing aspect of ScienceOnline is the interaction with interesting and interested science, journalism, and library professionals. I have just put #scio11 on my calendar and look forward to meeting more interesting folks!

Thank you so much for the interview. I hope to see you soon, and of course at the next conference in January.

RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)

One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.

Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded nearly $2 billion – about $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $35 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

Sheila Kannapan, a UNC physics and astronomy professor, and a few of her students are using SOAR to measure the mass of large objects and star clusters in the universe. Their work is part of a survey that, for the first time, will allow astrophysicists to determine the mass of the universe and better understand dark matter.

During a visit to the UNC campus Thursday, where scientists access the telescope from a remote control room, David Stark and David Hendel, two of Kannapan’s students, explained some of the survey work they do.

David Hendel, an astrophysics student at UNC, talks about his work with SOAR.

Kannapan’s students use a spectrograph, an instrument that measures the light from an object.

Standing in front of a board that showed a drawing of the spectrograph and a measurement chart, Hendel and Stark said the measurements allow assessments about what the light is made of and how far away an object really is.

On a television screen nearby, I and my fellow science writers could watch telescope operators in Chile working their shift and watching us through a Web cam mounted on the screen.

The computer screen below the TV showed a rendering of the Sombrero Galaxy, which is visible through amateur telescopes. Hendel showed us the bright speck on the lower edge of the galaxy that is a new object UNC astrophysicists are studying.

As part of our visit, which was organized by the Triangle-based group of science writers SCONC, we also listened to a presentation by Gerald Cecil, a UNC physics and astronomy professor who teaches students how to build stargazing instruments.

Gerald Cecil

Cecil, who helped design and build SOAR, hopes to this year finish an instrument made with fiberglass cables that would provide a grid of light measurements rather than just a thin slice.

But now the bad news about SOAR, as laid out by Cecil, a wiry, hands-on teacher who’s frustrated by the difficulty of getting funding. (On the bottom of his Web site, Cecil has a running account of the costs of U.S. oil imports and the Iraq war.)

UNC astrophysics, a small department of about half a dozen professors, can get on SOAR 60 nights of the year. That’s fairly unique access to a telescope like SOAR, which is designed to produce the best quality images of any observatory in its class in the world.

To gain this access for 20 years, UNC paid $8 million up front, which did not include ongoing maintenance costs. That’s another $80,000 to $100,000 every year.

Fund-raising efforts have begun to continue the SOAR project, which is also funded by Michigan State University, the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory and Brazil. But money is tight at public universities like UNC and Michigan and federal stimulus money to boost research and development isn’t available for a telescope on top of a Chilean mountain.

Cecil worries that in 2016, when access to SOAR must be renewed, UNC astrophysicists will lose the 60 nights in the sky that now allow them to complete research in a couple of weeks that otherwise would take a year.

U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt

He carried a to-do list with him that he plans to take to Congress and the Obama Administration.

Changing the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates the development of new medicines,  making the research and development tax credit for companies permanent and establishing a federal office to spearhead public-private partnerships between universities, the National Institutes of Health and R&D companies were among the suggestions on the list.

“It needs to be the new space program in my view,” Gephardt told about 100 people at the packed Capital City Club in Raleigh. 

Gov. Beverly Perdue, mayors and economic development officials from across the state attended the event, which was meant as a first step to build grassroots support for Gephardt’s to-do list.

At stake is the global leadership position the U.S. built in the past 30 years in discovering new medical treatments, improving quality of life and advancing health care, according to a report the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice released June 10. The Council for American Medical Innovation, or CAMI, an advocacy group Gephardt chairs, commissioned the report.

Experts, investors and bright minds from industry, universities and foundations whose brains the Battelle researchers picked, pinpointed several risk factors that the U.S. is in danger of losing its medical innovation edge.

Among those factors is the declining number of novel medicines that have come to market in the past decade. Between 2005 and 2008, the FDA approved on average 19 per year compared to an average 31 per year during the 1990s. A nearly 29 percent decline in venture capital that set emerging biomedical companies back during the recession was also troublesome. So were the science scores among 12th graders, which declined almost 3 percent from 1996 to 2005.

Health care and research to find new treatments have long been among Gephardt’s interests. What caught his attention was a novel triple cancer therapy that saved his son’s life nearly 40 years ago, he said. Gephardt supported a form of universal health care and helped double the NIH’s budget to support basic research to about $30 billion in 2003.

The unprecedented increase in NIH funding several years ago and a $10 billion boost the NIH received in stimulus funds last year benefited research institutions across the Triangle, including Duke University, RTI International and the University of North Carolina.

But Gephardt’s agenda to spur medical innovation and create more R&D jobs in the U.S. will face a Congress and a White House trying to gain control over a ballooning federal deficit. Gephardt didn’t think the NIH’s budget will be cut, but he acknowledged the belt-tightening mood in Washington by saying that his to-do list isn’t a “big ticket item. Yes,” he added, “this costs money, but the payoff is enormous.”

Dr. Laura Jackson of the EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), a unit of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development that is housed in Research Triangle Park.

Dr. Jackson and her colleagues in this RTP lab—more than 100 scientists—conduct research on ecosystem services, those benefits provided by the environment over and above the psychological benefits of being out in nature. These services can have tangible and measurable economic value.

For instance, in a normally functioning ecosystem, vegetation would take up nitrogen and phosphorus from animal waste and keep those nutrients from overburdening groundwater and streams. In last week’s example, when hogs were added to an ecosystem, they knocked it out of balance by depositing more nutrients than the vegetation could handle and by removing plants that could take up the nutrients and provide erosion control. The researchers at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems were developing countermeasures to keep the water clean near hog farming operations and restore ecosystem function.

In addition to cleaning water, vegetation can also scrub pollutants from the air, and the EPA’s Dr. Jackson and her colleagues are looking into the capacity of plantings near roads to filter pollutants from vehicles. Given the connection between tailpipe emissions and respiratory illnesses, this promises to be a fruitful area of research: imagine the cost savings on medication and lost work time if nature can help prevent illness.

Another example of an ecosystem service, Dr. Jackson said, is the ability of urban vegetation to mitigate the “heat-island” effect, reducing the risk of heat stress in vulnerable populations. (Think green roofs.) In this example, nature would not only alleviate illness but eliminate some of the need to burn fossil fuels for air conditioning.

It’s already obvious that ecosystem services can be an important public health tool, and we haven’t even gotten to the topic I called Dr. Jackson to discuss: Lyme disease.

Lyme is of growing concern in the Research Triangle region; more on that in a moment. It is also of particular interest to me, because I am a renegade Durhamite living in New York’s Hudson Valley. My new home is not only the hotbed of Lyme disease but one of the hotbeds of Lyme disease research. It’s almost child’s play to get Lyme disease here, and nearly any symptom that brings you to the doctor will result in blood tests for Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. They are that common.

At the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, where I am loosely affiliated as a science writer, Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld is leading a team studying the impact of biodiversity on Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. Long-term research conducted by Ostfeld’s lab reveals that more people get Lyme disease when natural landscapes are fragmented by development and other human activities. Large carnivores who need lots of space are driven away, and white-footed mice, which carry the bacteria that causes Lyme, thrive in the absence of these predators.

Given my newfound geographical interest in Lyme, I was incredibly interested to hear that someone in the Triangle—my beat for this blog—is working on this same topic. Dr. Jackson talked to me about her research findings and about how the EPA is using research like hers to affect decision making.

Dr. Jackson initiated the Lyme research as part of her Ph.D. program in Ecology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her primary research tool: satellite imagery upon which she plotted records of Lyme disease cases gleaned from existing state health department records. Using an off-the-shelf statistical program, she was able to identify the types of landscapes most associated with high rates of Lyme disease: places where the edges of forests intermixed with herbaceous cover such as lawn or pasture.

And these are the kinds of places where new neighborhoods are being developed, says Jackson. “It’s popular to build out towards ‘green fields’ or undeveloped land,” she says. “People want to be near forests.” On these edges, where deer, ticks, white-footed mice, and people all exist, it’s what she calls “a perfect environment” for the transmission of Lyme disease.

Figure from Hilborn E, Jackson L, Orme-Zavaleta J. 2010. Environment and Lyme Disease Risk. Pages 399-414 In: Holmgren, A. and G. Borg (eds.), Handbook of Disease Outbreaks: Prevention, Detection and Control. Nova Science Publishers: New York.

There is no vaccine against Lyme disease in humans; it can be treated with antibiotics, but people can get it many times if infected ticks bite them. Individuals can avoid the disease by dressing appropriately, using bug spray, and checking their skin for ticks. Education in these individual measures is one public health approach to disease prevention.

But to Dr. Jackson, a broader approach to risk is called for. One landowner on a forest edge can clear shrubs to discourage deer, or lay down a strip of wood chips as a buffer between forest and lawn, but unless all of the property owners along an edge do this, she says, the risk factors will remain for the entire nearby population. She believes that whole neighborhoods have to work in concert to reduce risk.

In addition, one goal is to “design out the risk” for Lyme and related diseases by making decisions about land use based on research findings. To that end, she and her EPA colleagues are partnering with Michigan State University’s Digital Watershed to create an online tool that will predict whether developing a particular landscape in a particular way will create a high or low risk for Lyme disease. It will become part of EPA’s online Environmental Decision Toolkit in the future. Using tools like this, it is possible that without spending an extra cent in development costs or public health money, neighborhoods could be designed that work with nature to reduce the risk of Lyme. That is the concept of ecosystem services at work.

Although Dr. Jackson’s original research focused on Maryland, it has implications for the Research Triangle area, where she grew up. “The tick is here,” she says, referring to the black-legged tick that carries the bacterium that causes Lyme. “And the disease is here.” As wildlife habitats are being converted for development, she says, we don’t have the expansive natural habitats that we used to have. Given the style of development happening in the Triangle, she says, “it’s not surprising that Lyme is here.”

For most of us, our neurons remain malleable throughout our lives, giving us the opportunity for lifelong learning (though it does get harder with age). But for those afflicted with the rare genetic disease Angelman syndrome, the synapses are almost completely incapable of being remodeled. By the time children with Angelman syndrome are toddlers, their synapses have largely lost their plasticity, hardening like concrete into rigid structures that can no longer easily relay new information.

The result is quite tragic – children whose bodies grow and age normally but whose brains are locked forever in the state of a two year old. But there is also reason to hope, as tremendous progress has been made in the understanding of Angelman syndrome, say many of the researchers, clinicians, and parents in attendance at a recent conference on the disorder. The 2010 Angelman Treatment and Research Institute Scientific Symposium, held at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill on June 15 and 16, showcased the current research on the genetic disease, with efforts tapping into the latest technological tools from mouse models, brain imaging, stem cells, proteomics and gene therapy.

“Over the span of the conferences I have attended, I really feel like I can see the gap getting smaller between the cellular molecular finding and its clinical applications,” said Heather Adams, a neuropsychologist from Massachusetts who specializes in kids with cognitive impairment. She also has a daughter with Angelman syndrome.

Angelman syndrome is a rare intellectual disorder that affects about one out of every 15,000 people. It is often placed on the autism spectrum because of the shared language difficulties and inappropriate social behavior. The language impairment in people with Angelman syndrome is much more severe than in those with autism – in fact, most of them never speak a single word. And whereas individuals with autism might shun social interaction, those with Angelman are quite social.

“One of the very endearing things about these individuals is they have a very happy demeanor,” said one of the conference’s organizers, Ben Philpot, an Associate Professor in Cell and Molecular Physiology at the University of North Carolina. “They are often said to have inappropriate laughter, but I think that they just find more things in life funny than we do.”

Their child-like view of the world – and the detrimental ramifications of a brain that is unable to change — all stem from a defect in a single gene called UBE3A. If the gene is mutated or deleted, the result is Angelman syndrome. But if it is duplicated, it may result in one of the more classic forms of autism. And altering its function can also lead to tumors of the cervix, though in the cancer field the gene goes by the name E6AP. So studying this one gene and its effects on the plasticity of our brains could have far-reaching implications.

“The work related to synaptic plasticity in genetic syndromes is forming thrilling insights as far as how we reason and learn things,” said conference attendee William Snider, director of the UNC Neuroscience Center.

At the two-day conference, scientists from across the country presented their latest findings on the role of this infamous gene in disease. One of the invited speakers, Harvard’s Michael Greenberg, explained the findings he had recently published in the journal Cell on targets of UBE3A. The molecule’s main job is to mark other proteins to be broken down or destroyed, so if UBE3A is absent then certain proteins accumulate to inappropriately high levels, causing subtle but lasting damage to our brain cells.

“If we know what the targets are we may be able to produce therapies that can break them down when UBE3A is no longer able to do its job,” said Philpot.
Philpot’s own work has indicated that pharmacotherapeutics or behavioral modifications may be able to restore the brain’s plasticity. He is currently using funding from the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS) to search for new molecules to treat Angelman syndrome, an area that is understandably of intense interest for many in the field.

“As a scientist I say the progress that has been made so far is remarkable, but as a parent, I say it is not fast enough,” said Alina Szmant, a marine biologist from Wilmington who has a 31-year-old daughter, Selena, with Angelman Syndrome.

Mark Nespeca, a clinician at Children’s Hospital in San Diego who also attended the conference, says that the pace of research depends a lot on your perspective. Because he does not conduct research himself, conferences like this one help him keep up with the many advances that have occurred since he was in medical school.

“With the advances in technology today, people are talking about sequencing your entire genome for just a thousand dollars,” said Nespeca. “There may come a day when kids will be coming to us at two months of age newly diagnosed, and we can say is there something we can do to make a difference so you can walk, can talk, not have seizures. But for a parent dealing with this illness day in and day out, it must be hard to wait and hope for that day to come.”

Dr. Maria Escolar

Dr. Maria Escolar was a 35-year-old pediatrician overseeing a program for doctors in training at Duke University 12 years ago when she saw her first patient with Krabbe disease.

Named after a Danish neurologist who first described it in 1913, Krabbe disease is a rare, genetic disorder that is painful and damages mental and motor skills. Children with the disease show no symptoms at birth, but without treatment they go deaf and blind and usually die by the time they are 3.

“It’s one of the most horrible diseases I’ve ever encountered,” Escolar said.

In 1998, very little was known about Krabbe disease and similar metabolic diseases beyond the fact that they were fatal and no cure existed. Escolar, who now heads the program for neurodevelopmental function in rare disorders at the University of North Carolina Gene Therapy Center, was instrumental in changing that research gap.

In 2005, Escolar co-authored a landmark study on Krabbe disease that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study tracked the development of children with the disease who received transplants of umbilical-cord blood from healthy donors. The treatment was developed at Duke and was based on research Escolar and her colleagues at Duke and UNC did on the symptoms and progression of rare, genetic metabolic diseases.

Today, North Carolina’s Research Triangle area remains one of the few places in the world where children with these diseases are treated and new, experimental treatments are being explored.

During a presentation she made at the May TARDC luncheon at Research Triangle Park headquarters, Escolar outlined how much researchers have learned about the diseases since 1998 and what they still don’t know.

Also known as lysosomal storage disorders, these rare, genetic metabolic diseases are caused by mutations that are either inherited or happen spontaneously. The mutations disable enzymes the body needs to break down fat, protein and sugar molecules and make cell building blocks. Just one faulty enzyme can lead to the accumulation of undigested molecules that damage the brain and destroy the protective myelin sheath around nerves.

Lysosomal storage disorders occur in 1 in 100,000 people. The program Escolar heads at UNC has seen more than 400 affected children, 65 of them with Krabbe disease.

More than 100 of the children received umbilical-cord blood transplants.

Whether the transplants prolonged lives, prevented damage and lessened symptoms depended on the disease.

The transplant prevented cognitive damage in some of the children with Hunter Syndrome, a lysosomal storage disease that affects mostly boys. But others didn’t benefit and researchers are trying to find out why, Escolar said. The results in children with Sanfilippo Syndrome, another lysosomal storage disease, were equally puzzling. None of the children benefited from the transplants, except one boy whose social skills improved.

In children with Krabbe disease, the transplants were most effective when given before symptoms developed. Children who were treated within three months of birth suffered much less brain damage than children who were treated later, but even among the youngest transplant patients some showed delays in the development of motor skills.

“Now we understand that transplantation fixes a lot of problems, but we’re not catching it early enough,” Escolar said. A diagnosis in the first two years of life is crucial, she said. Newborn screening for Krabbe disease, as it was introduced in the state of New York in 2006, would be best, she added.

Researchers are also exploring treatment alternatives. Umbilical-cord blood transplantations have a 15 percent mortality risk, because they require chemotherapy and a year’s worth of immunosuppressive drugs. Some European researchers have tried treating the bone marrow of affected children. At UNC, researchers are looking into versions of gene therapy.

Today, I asked Karyn Hede to answer a few questions:

Welcome to ScienceInTheTriangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I think of myself as a scientist who writes, even though I jumped out of research after graduate school. Most of my formal education is in science. I was biology/chemistry major and then studied genetics in graduate school at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. I should have known I would end up a science communicator though. As an undergraduate, I performed in a “chemistry magic show.” We would go around to elementary and middle schools and get kids involved in the show. It was fantastic to see kids get engaged and to realize that science can be fun. After I committed to making the switch to writing about science and medicine, I studied journalism at UNC-CH. This was well before the medical journalism program existed. I was the oddball. I like to think I helped plant the seed for that program. I’ve spent my whole career telling stories about medicine, science and scientists.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

My first professional writing gig was for a local publication called Triangle Business Journal. I talked the editor into letting me write personality profiles of local scientists. My first interview was with George Hitchings, of the [now defunct] Burroughs Wellcome Co., who had just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He was so gracious, and I was so nervous! Many years later, I was working as communications officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a post now occupied by the inestimable Russ Campbell, when Dr. Hitchings passed away. We went over to the old Burroughs Wellcome offices to collect some of his memorabilia for display. They had his personal scrapbook there – he had cut out the article I wrote and put it in his scrapbook. That remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid as a writer.

I was senior science writer at Duke Medical Center for four years. I learned how to put together broadcast-quality video and how to organize and run a news conference. It was a hectic job, and I spent a lot of my time responding to media requests. I discovered I prefer to be on the other side of the equation. I like to be the one asking questions.

Currently, I am a news correspondent for Journal of the National Cancer Institute and for the journal Science’s Careers site. I also write for magazines and science organizations.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?

An undercurrent within my work has always been career development for scientists. When I was a graduate student, you were pretty much on your own as far as exploring career options and developing professional skills. I enjoy teaching and helping support the next generation of scientists. In the last couple of years I have done some consulting work with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center to promote professional science masters programs with the state. We organized a meeting around the issue in 2008. I’ve also been working with Russ Campbell on a series of professional development booklets for scientists. Recently, I started teaching scientific writing for biomedical graduate students at UNC. I taught two courses, one for first-year students and a second course I developed for students who are working their first grant or their dissertation. It’s my way of giving back.

What are your goals?

I am also into gardening and the local food movement. I subscribe to a local CSA at Maple Spring Gardens. A few years ago I organized a session at the National Association of Science Writers meeting to get science writers more interested in covering how our food is produced. Since then, the topic has gotten a lot of coverage, with Michael Pollan’s fantastic books and all the concern over outbreaks of food-borne disease. I’d love to write more about the intersection of science and food production.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I think the wave of the future in science communication is going to be scientists engaging directly with people through their own blogs, videos and websites. Some people (like you!) are naturals and don’t need any help. I know scientists who would like to move more into this arena, but don’t know how to get started. I’d like to work with scientists to help them develop those communication and storytelling skills.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I read blogs and have gotten story ideas from blogs. I don’t have a blog (yet). I like to let ideas percolate for awhile before writing. The thought of having to produce coherent posts every day (or nearly so) is a bit daunting. My Facebook connections are mostly old friends from college and family. I like LinkedIn for work-related networking – it’s a bit more professional and I like having more control over the content.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I lived in Washington state for several years and moved back to North Carolina a couple of years ago. In my absence, I discovered an enthusiastic on-line science blogging community had grown up here. I wasn’t surprised. This has always been a science-rich area – blogging is just the latest incarnation of the local science communications community, but with a much wider reach now. I read your blog, Drugmonkey, Female Science Professor, The Intersection, and Terra Sigillata, among others.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year?

This was my first time attending ScienceOnline. I was impressed with the sessions and particularly the workshops on Fri. The sessions on visualization in science were valuable, because I was teaching at the time and was able to gather a lot of incredible resources for my students. Meeting so many interesting people who are inventing the future of science communication was great. I’d love to see more of a mashup of working scientists and science communicators shaping the agenda next year.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you can come again next January.

A concentrated photovoltaic "solar tree" designed by MegaWatt Solar. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

I recently wrote a two-part post here reporting on a forum in Research Triangle Park which focused on barriers to homegrown global business innovation in the Triangle and in North Carolina. While contemplating the themes of the forum, and skimming today’s science news, I stumbled across this article in  Popular Mechanics magazine which looks into the advances in concentrated photovoltaics over the past few years — and leads with the example of MegaWatt Solar, a renewable energy start-up in our own backyard. The company was formed by three professors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who seek to create utility-scaled concentrated photovoltaic systems to supplement fossil fuels-based energy production. (They’ve also been featured in UNC’s Endeavors research magazine, and have landed a story or two in the News & Observer, no longer available in their web archives.)

It struck me that MegaWatt Solar is a good example of the applied research that our area universities can generate to solve real-world problems, and also of the links that can be established between professors with marketable ideas and business-savvy entrepreneurs that can help carry the ideas from the research bench to the bank. Their story is truly one of homegrown innovation, though to be fair they are still in the pilot study phase and working out some kinks.

Because I’ve already written this story, I’m not going to write it again… Below is a reprint of the cover story article I penned about the people behind MegaWatt Solar, and their mission, for the fall 2009 issue of UNC College of Arts & Sciences magazine. It is reprinted here with full permission from the editors.

UNC Arts & Science cover, fall 2009, with MegaWatt Solar founders.

The Power of 20 Suns

MegaWatt Solar is a small start-up energy company in Hillsborough, N.C., backed by $17 million from Norwegian venture capitalists and mentally powered by three researchers in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Tucked away in a brick textile-mill-turned-office-park, the company is poised to bring a new concentrated photovoltaic system to market that could provide the cheapest large-scale renewable source of electricity available anywhere.

But they didn’t design it for your home. They designed it for your utility company, to offset peak energy demand, which tends to coincide with the sunniest portions of the solar day. The term MegaWatt describes their goal of producing one megawatt of electricity from over a thousand solar “trees” spread across about 10 acres. The solar trees rotate on a dual axis mount that tracks the sun across the sky vault. One megawatt of electricity — one million watts — is enough to power about 800 homes.

MegaWatt Solar was founded by astrophysicist Chris Clemens, theoretical physicist Charles Evans, computer scientist Russ Taylor and a private sector power-grid systems engineer, Dan Gregory. They built their alpha version in spring 2006 in Evans’ driveway from what he describes as “an aluminum erector set for adults,” with parts bought off E-Bay, cheap advertising signboard and a highly reflective material scavenged from the interior of a Solotube skylight.

The best part? It worked.

“Boy, it was bright, “Evans said. “Everyone ran to get their sunglasses.”

They measured its electrical output and knew they were on to something red hot. The alpha reflector had a concentrating factor of 24:1. However, the team reduced this to 20:1 in their final design, to balance limitations from excessive heat buildup with low-cost solutions. Still, the power of 20 suns is impressive.

Since that weekend science project, the researchers have ruthlessly honed their design in an iterative process. They are on their fourth version, which uses four trough-shaped mirrors to produce about 0.75 kilowatts, and Clemens thinks they are nearing the finish line. He believes they will have a marketable product within a year that produces 1 kilowatt. A power utility would need to install about 1,000 of the concentrated solar trees, which Taylor estimates would take about 10 acres, to produce one megawatt. From the get-go, the trio wanted the design to be as low-cost as possible.

Rows of photovoltaic cells engineered to receive 20 times the concentration of normal sunlight. (Image from MegaWatt Solar web site.)

They have one pilot project in Caswell County, where Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation has installed sixteen 12-mirror solar trees. The team is retro-fitting the units to address wind demands, but they expect the new solar plant to be online by December, when they will begin field-testing them. A second pilot project is planned in Florida. They are also field testing six units that are located a stone’s throw from their Hillsborough office. MegaWatt’s solar trees are modular in design, to allow for periodic upgrades in a fast-paced technological world. Clemens, whose background is in astronomical instrumentation, designed the rough concept for the unit, and Evans focused on perfecting the light collecting and concentrating system.

“One of our mantras was that because the mirrors are the component that would cover a lot of ground, they had to pretty much be cheaper than dirt,” Evans said. They settled on an inexpensive exterior signboard material called Dibond, topped with a 3M film. Clemens jokes that it is the “cheapest mirror known to man,” but its 94 percent reflectivity and extremely light-weight aluminum frame are no joke. Taylor and his team worked on the computing that drives the dual-axis mechanical and optical tracking system. His team designed software that learns and anticipates where the reflectors need to be, and directs them there. This software allows the units to be installed anywhere on earth, he said, and within three days the unit will learn all it needs to know to track the sun and keep the reflectors in the right place.

Clemens and Evans extensively researched other concentrated photovoltaic projects and picked the best elements from them. A central key to their process was using existing technologies and materials, which kept costs down. MegaWatt Solar does not plan to mass produce the solar trees. Rather, they plan to work directly with interested utilities, license the design to large engineering firms, and advise local contractors on the construction and parts-purchasing.

They’re not the first to propose concentrating light to make more efficient use of photovoltaic cells. But they may be the first to do it cheaply, reliably and at a utility scale.