National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences highlight Professor Upal Ghosh’s work cleaning contaminated waterways

By: Catherine Meyers | Published: Feb 23, 2024 | UMBC NEWS

The positive environmental and health impacts of work led by Upal Ghosh, professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering at UMBC, was recently highlighted by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The agency showcased a low-cost technology that Ghosh and his colleagues developed to clean waterways contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a group of likely carcinogenic chemicals that were used in insulation, coolants, and electrical equipment for decades before being banned in the U.S. in 1979. 

The chemicals are stable and persist in the environment, often accumulating in fish that live in contaminated waterways and posing a risk to humans who consume those fish. NIEHS funded Ghosh’s research into using activated carbon pellets to bind the chemicals in place at the bottom of the waterways. This prevents the PCBs from circulating through the aquatic food chain. In projects carried out in contaminated lakes, rivers, and harbors in Delaware, Maryland, and elsewhere, Ghosh’s team demonstrated that the technique could significantly reduce the concentration of PCBs in the water and in aquatic lifeforms. Importantly, the technique is also significantly cheaper than standard clean-up approaches, such as dredging and disposing of contaminated sediment. 

In related work performed with Kevin Sowers, from the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, Ghosh’s team also developed a way to combine the activated carbon with microbes that break down PCBs, reducing their toxicity.

With NIEHS support, Ghosh has co-founded two companies—Sediment Solutions and RemBac—to commercialize the technology and deploy it at full-scale to clean up contaminated sites across the country, such as at Mirror Lake in Delaware.

“The technology brings together innovations in material science and biology,” says Ghosh. It’s an honor, he says, that the NIEHS, the leading agency in the country that funds research on public health and the environment, recognized “the real impact our research is having on improving public health.”

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UMBC is excited to announce Candice Hill as the new head coach for UMBC women’s basketball team. Hill is the 11th coach in the history of the program. 

Hill returns to her home city of Baltimore after spending the last three seasons as associate head coach and recruiting coordinator at perennial Big East contender St. John’s University in New York. 

“We are delighted to bring Candice to UMBC to lead our women’s basketball program,” said UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby. “Her approach to leadership, her coaching philosophy, and her values will help ensure the success of and support for our student-athletes, both on and off the court.”

Hill joined St. John’s as assistant coach and recruiting coordinator in April of 2021. She was elevated to associate head coach following the 2021-22 campaign and previously served in various roles at her alma mater, Loyola University Maryland, the University of Massachusetts (UMass), and Wilmington University in Delaware. 

“I want to thank President Sheares Ashby and the entire athletics administration for believing in me and granting me the opportunity to be the leader of the UMBC women’s basketball program,” says Hill. “As a Baltimore native, UMBC has been a part of my journey and has always held a special place in my heart. The moment I stepped foot on campus I knew this is where I needed and wanted to be.”

Following the 2019-2020 season at UMass, Hill earned the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s prestigious Thirty Under 30 Award, an honor that recognizes up-and-coming coaches at all levels of women’s basketball.

“Candice is a fantastic addition to the Retriever family,” said Whitney Ames, associate athletics director and senior woman administrator. “Throughout the hiring process, Candice clearly communicated her passion for creating a student-athlete experience that encompasses athletic and academic success at the highest level. We’re excited to welcome her to campus and participate in her continued development of our women’s basketball program.”

Story by UMBC Athletics.

Students of all majors are invited to attend the second annual Pre-Law Networking Social!   

Current undergraduate students and recent graduates will have the opportunity to connect with UMBC alumni in law school and the legal profession in an informal setting.  

Date:  Thursday April 25, 2024 

Time:  5:30 PM-7:00 PM

Location:  The Commons, Lower Flat Tuesdays

Click here to RSVP!

Kindly RSVP by Monday, April 22

Appetizers, iced tea, coffee, and hot tea will be served.  

Hosted by: Alumni Engagement and Pre-Law Advising 

Written by Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, UMBC

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Why don’t numbers end? – Reyhane, age 7, Tehran, Iran

Here’s a game: Ask a friend to give you any number and you’ll return one that’s bigger. Just add “1” to whatever number they come up with and you’re sure to win.

The reason is that numbers go on forever. There is no highest number. But why? As a professor of mathematics, I can help you find an answer.

First, you need to understand what numbers are and where they come from. You learned about numbers because they enabled you to count. Early humans had similar needs – whether to count animals killed in a hunt or keep track of how many days had passed. That’s why they invented numbers.

But back then, numbers were quite limited and had a very simple form. Often, the “numbers” were just notches on a bone, going up to a couple hundred at most.

When numbers got bigger

As time went on, people’s needs grew. Herds of livestock had to be counted, goods and services traded, and measurements made for buildings and navigation. This led to the invention of larger numbers and better ways of representing them.

About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians began using symbols for various numbers, with a final symbol for one million. Since they didn’t usually encounter bigger quantities, they also used this same final symbol to depict “many.”

The Greeks, starting with Pythagoras, were the first to study numbers for their own sake, rather than viewing them as just counting tools. As someone who’s written a book on the importance of numbers, I can’t emphasize enough how crucial this step was for humanity.

By 500 BCE, Pythagoras and his disciples had not only realized that the counting numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on – were endless, but also that they could be used to explain cool stuff like the sounds made when you pluck a taut string.

Zero is a critical number

But there was a problem. Although the Greeks could mentally think of very large numbers, they had difficulty writing them down. This was because they did not know about the number 0.

Think of how important zero is in expressing big numbers. You can start with 1, then add more and more zeroes at the end to quickly get numbers like a million – 1,000,000, or 1 followed by six zeros – or a billion, with nine zeros, or a trillion, 12 zeros.

It was only around 1200 CE that zero, invented centuries earlier in India, came to Europe. This led to the way we write numbers today.

This brief history makes clear that numbers were developed over thousands of years. And though the Egyptians didn’t have much use for a million, we certainly do. Economists will tell you that government expenditures are commonly measured in millions of dollars.

Also, science has taken us to a point where we need even larger numbers. For instance, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy – or 100,000,000,000 – and the number of atoms in our universe may be as high as 1 followed by 82 zeros.

Don’t worry if you find it hard to picture such big numbers. It’s fine to just think of them as “many,” much like the Egyptians treated numbers over a million. These examples point to one reason why numbers must continue endlessly. If we had a maximum, some new use or discovery would surely make us exceed it.

Exceptions to the rule

But under certain circumstances, sometimes numbers do have a maximum because people design them that way for a practical purpose.

A good example is a clock – or clock arithmetic, where we use only the numbers 1 through 12. There is no 13 o’clock, because after 12 o’clock we just go back to 1 o’clock again. If you played the “bigger number” game with a friend in clock arithmetic, you’d lose if they chose the number 12.

Since numbers are a human invention, how do we construct them so they continue without end? Mathematicians started looking at this question starting in the early 1900s. What they came up with was based on two assumptions: that 0 is the starting number, and when you add 1 to any number you always get a new number.

These assumptions immediately give us the list of counting numbers: 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, and so on, a progression that continues without end.

You might wonder why these two rules are assumptions. The reason for the first one is that we don’t really know how to define the number 0. For example: Is “0” the same as “nothing,” and if so, what exactly is meant by “nothing”?

The second might seem even more strange. After all, we can easily show that adding 1 to 2 gives us the new number 3, just like adding 1 to 2002 gives us the new number 2003.

But notice that we’re saying this has to hold for any number. We can’t very well verify this for every single case, since there are going to be an endless number of cases. As humans who can perform only a limited number of steps, we have to be careful anytime we make claims about an endless process. And mathematicians, in particular, refuse to take anything for granted.

Here, then, is the answer to why numbers don’t end: It’s because of the way in which we define them.

Now, the negative numbers

How do the negative numbers -1, -2, -3 and more fit into all this? Historically, people were very suspicious about such numbers, since it’s hard to picture a “minus one” apple or orange. As late as 1796, math textbooks warned against using negatives.

The negatives were created to address a calculation issue. The positive numbers are fine when you’re adding them together. But when you get to subtraction, they can’t handle differences like 1 minus 2, or 2 minus 4. If you want to be able to subtract numbers at will, you need negative numbers too.

A simple way to create negatives is to imagine all the numbers – 0, 1, 2, 3 and the rest – drawn equally spaced on a straight line. Now imagine a mirror placed at 0. Then define -1 to be the reflection of +1 on the line, -2 to be the reflection of +2, and so on. You’ll end up with all the negative numbers this way.

As a bonus, you’ll also know that since there are just as many negatives as there are positives, the negative numbers must also go on without end!

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.