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Cynthia M. Beall, Sarah Idell Pyle Professor of Anthropology, recently led an interdisciplinary team of researchers to Tibet, where they studied a group of Tibetan mothers and their children dwelling more than two and a half miles above sea level. The team discovered that these women maintain relatively high blood oxygen levels - a trait associated with infant survival - even though they live at an altitude where oxygen is scarce. This finding, which indicates natural selection at work in a human population, appears in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research team also included Melvyn C. Goldstein, John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology at Case; Robert C. Elston, director of the graduate program in genetic and molecular epidemiology in the Case School of Medicine; and Kijoung Song from GlaxoSmithKlein. The National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Institute, and the Henry R. Luce Foundation provided funding for the expedition.
Another team of researchers, led by geological sciences professor Ralph Harvey, recently uncovered a piece of Mars in the most inhospitable place on Earth - Antarctica. The researchers, members of a field party from the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program, found the specimen on an ice field in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, nearly 500 miles from the South Pole. Because the 1.6-pound black rock, officially designated MIL 03346, can be studied in the laboratory, it will provide a critical "reality check" for scientists interpreting the wealth of images and data sent back by spacecraft currently exploring Mars. ANSMET is a cooperative effort supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. Harvey has been the program's principal investigator since 1991, leading numerous expeditions and participating in several others.
Under the direction of sociology professor Gary Deimling, researchers from the department of sociology and the Case School of Medicine have embarked on the second phase of the Cancer Survivors Research Project, a study examining the quality of life of older, long-term cancer survivors. The National Cancer Institute, which funded the initial five years of the project, has now awarded Deimling and his colleagues support for the next five years. The researchers on the project include Case sociology professors Deimling, Eva Kahana, and Kyle Kercher; Karen Bowman, senior research associate in the department of sociology and associate director of the project; and Boaz Kahana, professor of psychology at Cleveland State University. Deimling and Bowman, along with several graduate students, received an "award of excellence" when they presented a paper outlining the group's most recent findings at this year's Cancer Survivorship Conference, an event co-sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society.
Charles Rosenblatt, professor of physics and macromolecular science, recently received a three-year National Science Foundation grant for his study of "Symmetry and Molecular Architecture in Liquid Crystals." On his faculty web page, Rosenblatt writes, "Most people are first drawn to liquid crystals by their beautiful optical textures: stars, curves, splotches, and zig-zags, all in a palette of colors rivaling the most ostentatious paintings of modern art. On closer and more scientific inspection, one finds that liquid crystals are generally composed of rod-shaped molecules, which exhibit an intermediate degree of order between solid and liquid."Rosenblatt's study involves collaborations with researchers from the University of Halle in Germany, Göteborg University in Sweden, and the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. With this latest grant, Rosenblatt has received more than 20 years of uninterrupted NSF single investigator support.
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