Acts 5:12-16 – “The apostles performed many signs and wonders among the people. And all the believers used to meet together in Solomon’s Colonnade. No one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people.  Nevertheless, more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number. As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by impure spirits, and all of them were healed.”

“[…] When Jesus performed miracles, his actions had a significance beyond the immediate act of healing. His actions were signs of the Kingdom of God. They were indications of a higher order breaking into our natural order. His healings were a sign that God is the ultimate healer. His control over nature was a sign of God’s control over nature. His resurrection was the firstfruits of the new order of resurrection life. And in all these things God was in Christ, drawing our attention to who he was and pointing us to the future.” [C. Brown, That You May Believe: Miracles and Faith Then and Now]

Application: The signs and wonders point to the One, who is the healer, the Savior, Jesus. Let’s pray for greater activity of the Holy Spirit in our church so that there will be more added to our number.

– MK

UMBC’s Undergraduate Research Symposium for the Chemical and Biological Sciences has become a destination for young researchers across the Eastern Seaboard, and it’s still growing. This year’s 20th running of the event was the largest yet, with 307 students from 47 institutions presenting 245 distinct research projects to 54 faculty judges, on topics from ecology to molecular biology to inorganic chemistry.

Nearly 100 UMBC students participated in the flagship event, which offers a rare opportunity for undergraduates to gather in large numbers to discuss their work with one another and practice presenting their findings to a wide range of people.

UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski described UMBC’s culture in his morning address, emphasizing the importance of persistence. “Success is about grit—the determination to never never never give up,” he said. “It’s that passion for continuing to learn.”

At UMBC, he continued, which welcomes students from more than 100 countries, “we are interested in making the point to America through you and others that science is exciting, that anyone who is willing to put in the effort can do it, and that you can never ask enough questions.”

Those questions can lead to important answers that impact the lives of others. “The nobility of scientific research is that you work on problems to help people you may never see. Something about that gives me goosebumps,” Hrabowski shared, adding, “What you are doing will save humankind.”

That includes research by students like Emily Bush, from Elmira College in Elmira, New York.  She’s studying the effects of eugenol, an oily substance extractable from various herbs, on cancer cells. The scientist who judged her poster conducts research on the same cell lines, so Bush is heading home armed with useful feedback, inspired to “go back to the lab and really get some results and draw conclusions.”

Myra Dickey, of Salisbury University in Maryland, studied endangered spotted turtles in her research. By examining their DNA, she found that both sexes tend to disperse from their birthplace, which reduces the risk of inbreeding, but populations are so small and isolated that inbreeding’s detrimental effects are still a major concern. That means habitat conservation for the turtles is critical to their long-term survival.

Steven Lawrence and Moises Ridriguez, students at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, presented research they conducted through the Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) program at Columbia University and New York University, respectively. Lawrence learned new coding skills to analyze data collected from surveys of Dominican women about their concerns related to HIV. His findings will inform educational programs in Dominica, and he says the experience encouraged him to pursue health outreach activities. Rodriguez studied the relationship between the presence of a molecule called RAGE and the shape of cells in the brain called microglia. His results suggest that RAGE is involved in the inflammatory response, which is part of aging.

Ryan White, associate professor of chemistry and Ohio Eminent Scholar at the University of Cincinnati and former associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC, encouraged attendees to recognize the value of their work in his plenary talk. “Undergraduate research projects are not just side projects to give you experience and something to put on your resume,” he said. “Small discoveries you make along the way can really build momentum and lead to something bigger.”

White rebuffed rhetoric in the media suggesting millennials are “lazy” or “hopeless.” “You’re doing research, you’re critically thinking about what you’re doing, you’re solving problems,” he shared. “So my charge to you is to go out there and continue to do that—to prove all these articles wrong.”

White’s interdisciplinary lab is developing a range of bio-inspired sensors, with the broad goal of “building sensors that can help people by providing information to inform personalized medicine,” he said. To do that, he’s employing knowledge and techniques from nanoscience, electrochemistry, and biology—and several undergraduate students.

Dean Bill LaCourse, of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, was also optimistic, and echoed Hrabowski’s sentiments about the value of diversity in science. “When I do my research, I ask questions from the world from which I came,” he shared. “What’s beautiful about a room like this, and all your faces, all your backgrounds, is that the number of problems that can be addressed, the number of questions that can be asked, is multiplied.”

Looking out at the next generation of scientists, he reminded them, “You can answer questions to change the world that you grew up in. You have the power to create the future.”

Image: Students and guests explore the research posters in the University Center Ballroom. Photo by Mohammed Arafat ’19.

George Derek Musgrove ’97, associate professor of history,  launched his new book Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, University of North Carolina Press, with co-author Chris Myers Asch at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on November 2.

While teaching the history of the District of Columbia at the University of the District Columbia (UDC), Musgrove and Asch discovered the need for an accessible and comprehensive text that tells the full history of our nation’s capital.

After six years of research and writing they have produced a sweeping history of race and democracy in D.C. They argue that because of the consistent presence of a large black population, race, above and beyond other factors, has proven to be the most significant explanation for social, economic, and political divisions in the District — and as a bellwether for the country, D.C. shows how race has been the central fault line in American democracy.

“D.C. is a beacon for black America. In the 1830s it was a magnet for free blacks,” explains Musgrove, who has taught at UMBC since 2012. “During the Civil War it was a place to which slaves could escape from Maryland and Virginia and tens of thousands poured into the city. In the late 19th century it had the largest black population of any city in the country, and in 1957 it became the first majority black city in the United States.”

Like its namesake, the 1975 Parliament Funkadelic album Chocolate City, the book centers on the everyday people who make up the D.C. beyond Capitol Hill. It is a narrative focused on a city that is also a national stage.

For Musgrove, D.C. history includes the successful strivers but also the working people. It is the story of its more famous citizens like Mary Church Terrell and Walter Fauntroy, but also of welfare moms who create housing cooperatives, the struggles and triumphs of Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century, and the black elites of the Jazz Age.

In the process of weaving a national and local story, Musgrove and Asch realized two things: first, that D.C. history tells a unique story about American democracy by having the distinction of being the only city that is run by Congress and, second, how race influences this mode of governance.

The city provides us “a window into our democracy and how it is perverted by issues of race. These issues play out in the streets of the city,” explains Musgrove. “Keep it in mind that we are defining race not as black and white, but as Latinos, Ethiopians, as whites, and Native Americans. The latter group was central to understanding race and government for the first hundred years after contact.”

Musgrove and Asch draw on this vast documented history of the city and present the stories for a mass audience in one place with the hope that it will allow professors to engage new students of D.C. history, provide context for activists fighting gentrification, and help members of the neighborhoods continue to actively discuss their city’s history.

“Our hope is that people of goodwill will look at the lessons of D.C. history and use them to guide some of their activism,” says Musgrove.“We think it is a good guide for future action for making a better city, for making something really democratic of the alleged capital of the free world.”

Q&A: Read UMBC Magazine’s interview with Derek Musgrove ’97

For more information…

Chocolate City Facebook page:

Facebook.com/chocolatecitybook

Places to Purchase: 

UNC Press

Amazon

Banner image: George Derek Musgrove, Chris Myers Asch with moderator at the Oprah Winfrey Theatre in the National African American History and Culture Museum. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

by David Hoffman 

Two researchers at UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) and colleagues have found that instrumentation on the International Space Station (ISS) can collect data measuring the photosynthetic activity of various ecosystems and landscapes in a way that is both more comprehensive and more nuanced than standard land-based techniques.

“We’re laying the groundwork for developing ways of monitoring vegetation,” says Fred Huemmrich, JCET scientist and lead author on the new study. High-resolution monitoring of photosynthesis on landscapes such as agricultural fields, forests, and grasslands could inform everything from farming practices to our understanding of climate change.

Being able to detect productivity at high resolution could help farmers “evaluate how the field is doing, where there are problems, and perhaps identify things like insect damage and stress responses,” says Huemmrich, noting that similar techniques have successfully detected differences in fertilizer application on corn fields. The same information could be gleaned for managed forests, for example, to detect stress caused by destructive bark beetles.

On a larger scale, Huemmrich says that “most of what we know about how ecosystems respond to climate change and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is from models,” rather than concrete data. If scientists could use satellites, like the ISS, to track photosynthesis in real-time around the globe, that could greatly increase our understanding of how climate change is affecting vegetation. Plants are crucial for managing the global climate, because they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and release oxygen during photosynthesis.

The current gold-standard method for measuring photosynthesis relies on a network of hundreds of “flux towers” around the globe—structures on the ground that detect the flux of carbon in the area by “sniffing the air,” explains Huemmrich, but “the towers can’t be everywhere.” Remote sensing from a satellite would allow scientists to measure carbon fluxes in other places, even those that are inaccessible from the ground.

The new JCET study demonstrates an effective way to do just that, using images taken by the hyperspectral imager for coastal ocean (HICO), which is mounted on the ISS. Petya Campbell, a JCET scientist who was second author on the study, analyzed 26 total HICO images of three sites. Her analysis determined the photosynthetic productivity of vegetation canopies by detecting their reflectance of different wavelengths of light. Reflectance is a reliable measurement of photosynthesis because the amounts of different compounds present in leaves (such as chlorophyll and water) determine the plant’s photosynthetic activity, and each reflects differently.

The team found that multiple algorithms they used with the HICO data matched well with the tried-and-true data coming from the towers, providing strong evidence that this method of remote productivity monitoring can work well in both grasslands and forests. After further confirmation, researchers will be able to trust data about areas not also covered by flux towers. That’s an important advance, Campbell explains, because remote imaging spectroscopy “provides the only practical approach to map canopy functional traits, which are impossible to frequently measure on the ground and comprehensively map across space.”

In some cases, the measurements deduced from HICO data also provide information that flux towers can’t. Remote sensing does a better job distinguishing boundaries in a landscape, such as where a farm field transitions to a forest, and it also performs better on slopes. Plus, data collected by instruments on the ISS are unique because the space station is not in a “sun-synchronous” orbit, which means it passes over the same locations on Earth at different times of day. That allows researchers to detect differences in photosynthesis between morning and afternoon, as well as throughout the growing season and from many viewing angles.

Since the submission of Huemmrich and Campbell’s study, HICO has gone offline, but that doesn’t mean this kind of work is over. A new spectrometer is headed to the ISS in 2018, as well as other instruments that can measure water evaporating from leaves, plant fluorescence, and heat stress. “If NASA had asked me what four instruments I would want in space to study plants, that’s what I would have told them,” Huemmrich says. “Now we’re looking forward to having all four of these instruments on the space station and being able to do something with them.”

Learn more from the full article published in IEEE Journal of Special Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

Image: The international space station, provided by NASA.

Photography Lab Technician

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is looking for a qualified Freelance Graphic Designer to assist in the creation of graphic design in both print and digital platforms.

Design hours may vary, standard of 10 – 20 hours per week.

SUMMARY