Winds of Change: Massachusetts will share with Texas $2 million in federal grants from the US Department of Energy to fine-tune the art of harnessing wind energy, which is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the nation. The Massachusetts partnership includes UMass Amherst, MIT, the Massachusetts Port Authority, and other state agencies. With its portion of the monies, Massachusetts will set up a $15.2 million hangar on Port Authority land in Charlestown; turbine blades up to 230 feet long will be shipped there on barges for testing. UMass Amherst’s Renewable Energy Research Laboratory is a partner in the project. James F. Manwell, director of the Lab says the grant “establishes Massachusetts as the real center for this kind of research.”
The Powerful and Profane: Christopher Potts, assistant professor of linguistics at UMass Amherst, has been awarded a three-year, $217,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study the effects of swear words and epithets. “There’s a lot of language that’s very powerful and emotional,” he says. “Nearly everything we say carries an undercurrent of information about our feelings and attitudes.”
Save the Lobsters! New England fisherman are catching fewer lobsters
in their traps. A major contributor to the decline is shell disease.
Joseph Kunkel, professor of biology, received a two-year, $200,000
grant from the New England Lobster Research Initiative, to study how
bacteria invade and cause shells to rot. “Shell disease involves the
eventual demineralization of the hard outer shell,” says Kunkel, ”but
we don’t know if this occurs in the early phases of the disease or
where in the shell this process takes place.”
Star-maker Machinery: Measuring the amount of tidal debris in a present-day galaxy such as Andromeda is one way to determine whether large galaxies are built in part by the merging of smaller galaxies. To this end, a team of astronomers that includes Mark Fardal of UMass Amherst has discovered a group of stars within Andromeda believed to have been absorbed from another galaxy. Fardal developed computer simulations of the merger of a dwarf galaxy with Andromeda, which corresponds with the original findings. “In the model, the two galaxies first collided about 700 million years ago,” explains Fardal.
Got breast milk: When professor Kathleen Arcaro put out the call for fresh breast milk for her research into why some breast cells become cancerous, UMass Amherst alumnae responded enthusiastically. “It seemed as if every other person we talked to graduated from UMass,” says Arcaro. She and grad student Chung Wong are studying what happens to breast duct cells during lactation to better understand how full-term pregnancy at different ages may alter the risk of breast cancer. “We know early pregnancy and lactation decrease a woman’s lifetime risk of developing breast cancer, but we don’t know exactly why,” says Arcaro. “Learning how breast cells change to provide this protection can inform new strategies and treatments for all women.” Arcaro’s study examines the process of hypermethylation: changes to DNA that accrue over time as a result of aging, lifestyle, and environmental exposures. A major goal of this work is to understand which patterns of change correlate with breast cancer. Avon Foundation is providing $100,000 in funding; for each sample, women are given a $20 thank-you. To participate or learn more about the study, contact Kathleen Arcaro, 413 577-1823, or visit www.breastmilkstudy.net.
Smart Drugs: UMass Amherst chemists are designing a drug-delivery system that can regulate the release of medications specific to each patient. Chemistry professor S. “Thai” Thayumanavan leads the research under a $1.57 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The objective is to design a drug carrier that has feedback control,” explains Thayumanavan. Painkillers used for trauma on the battlefield, for example, would shut off automatically before toxicity.
