Leonardo da Vinci did the first experiments on friction, and found that most objects slip more easily as they slide faster, which makes intuitive sense. If a person’s foot slips, they are likely to fall. However, Autumn and colleagues studied the nano-hairs on gecko feet and discovered that gecko hairs actually become stickier as they slide faster, and did not wear out even after sliding 300 meters.

Autumn and his research team developed a mathematical theory based on the random vibration of the gecko’s nano-tips. Their theory suggested that it should be possible to fabricate a synthetic gecko-like material that also becomes stickier as it slides.

In this video Autumn demonstrates the effects of time and velocity on the capacity of matter to adhere and re-adhere.

Science “first” will advance technology for host of products

In the research, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, team member Mark Cutkosky at Stanford University molded synthetic hairs 10 times larger than real gecko’s hairs. The synthetic hairs became stickier as they slid, and resisted wear–a first for science. This “dynamic adhesive” has many applications, including anti-skid car tires, shoes, and sports equipment.

An interesting side-note to this study is that it provides some of the first empirical support for theories about atomic friction and earthquakes. Autumn and his coauthors suggest that geckos, atoms, and earthquakes may share common dynamics.

“By studying why geckos have the ability to stick to surfaces, the team led by Professor Autumn has made fundamental discoveries about the nature of friction and adhesion,” said John Rundle, professor of physics and geology, and an expert in earthquake simulation at the University of California-Davis. “These results may lead to advanced synthetic materials with novel and important properties, as well as providing far-reaching new insights into phenomena as disparate as earthquake faults and neural networks, both of which possess similar dynamics.”

More secrets to unearth in nature’s bio-diverse geckos
With over 1,000 species of geckos, each has a unique-pattern of nano-hairs on its toes. Autumn is currently working to understand why geckos have evolved so many different designs, and how this biodiversity can be used to solve sticky engineering problems ranging from automotive assembly to micro-electrical connections.

“One big question is how the size of the hairs affects their function,” Autumn said. “Theory suggests that smaller hairs stick better, but larger structures are easier to fabricate. Fortunately, species of gecko have evolved hairs of different sizes, so it is a matter of measuring hairs from these species.”

Autumn is also working to resolve conflicting studies about the role humidity plays in adhesion and studying how rough surfaces and hairs interact.

A biochemistry and molecular biology major, Holeman has earned numerous academic honors in his time at Lewis & Clark, including membership in the prestigious Pamplin Society of Fellows as well as being named a Rogers Scholar. Most recently, Holeman received a fellowship from the Compton Foundation’s Mentor Fellowship Program, which promotes the creativity, commitment, and service of ten graduating seniors across the country with the funding to implement a self-directed project.

Holeman hopes his project will aid communities with little infrastructure, where the transmission of basic yet life-saving information still depends on health workers walking up to 100 miles. By integrating a free program that turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a central communications hub and an electronic medical record system, the FrontlineSMS:Medic team will help to link workers in the field with health centers and hospitals.

“Isaac’s project is extremely innovative and will help launch him on what we all know will be an extraordinary career in public health,” said Professor of Economics Eban Goodstein.

As commencement nears, Holeman talks about how he has prepared for this work and shares his hopes for the project and the future.

Can you explain a bit about FrontlineSMS:Medic and what you’ll be doing for the organization?

A few months ago, I began working on a project using cell phones to empower community health workers in poor rural areas, mostly in East Africa. My initial vision was to give cell phones to health workers so that they could send text messages to doctors, and also write a program that would enable them to access electronic medical records with their phones. Since I started out, the project has grown a lot; I’ve teamed up with other students here at Lewis & Clark, as well as the undergraduate and medical schools at Stanford, and we decided to launch under the name FrontlineSMS:Medic. We’ve lined up some really great clinical partners, so we’ll be setting up this technology with at least 15 global health organizations across several continents in the next year. I’ll spend most of the year based out of Malawi, working with several health centers there, as well as directing implementation across the globe via e-mail and Skype.

How have your classes or extracurricular experiences at Lewis & Clark prepared you for this work?

I’m a biochemistry and molecular biology major. If I had not been a part of this rigorous, very challenging major, I just don’t think I would have the confidence to do what I’m doing right now. I have had some incredible experiences working with technology with friends here on campus, as well as with the vibrant open-source tech community in Portland. I used to think my fascination with technology was just a hobby. It was only recently that I discovered the field of global health informatics and realized that I could design a career that would bring together technology, information, and global health. Finally, studying abroad in Havana, The Netherlands, and Guatemala were all important experiences that prepared me to begin planning FrontlineSMS:Medic.

What other international experiences have you participated in, and what impact have those experiences had on you?

Choosing to study in The Netherlands between high school and college was probably the best decision I’ve ever made. When I finished high school, I was relatively egocentric and narrow minded, and, frankly, that lifestyle was not making me very happy. While abroad in Holland, I ended up selecting Lewis & Clark for it’s global and political ethos, and I’ve been thinking more and more about global citizenship since then. After my sophomore year, I spent about two months in Guatemala, learning Spanish and participating in a human rights delegation that taught me a lot about the practice of human rights (which is worlds away from the philosophy or scholarship of human rights). Just a few weeks after returning to The States, I left again for Havana, Cuba, with about 25 other LC students and a professor of sociology. I spent most of the semester conducting an ethnography at a walk-in clinic in downtown Havana. It was my first extensive qualitative research project, and a fascinating peek at a health system that is very different from our own.

You’ve been an advocate for health care reform in this country by working with the Archimedes Movement. You were also a vocal supporter of the Obama campaign. What changes do you hope to see in the sector in the next few years?

My freshman year at Lewis & Clark I started working with the Archimedes Movement and learning from visionary leaders like Liz Baxter and former Governor John Kitzhaber. For about four years, we’ve been trying to inject one big idea into the health care debate: the way we finance health care is distinct from the way we deliver it. Changing the financing mechanism alone will not get us out of this mess. Changing the structure of our delivery system will not be easy—one in 11 jobs in our economy is related to health care, and it’s not surprising that hard-working people want to keep their jobs. If we want to make our country viable again, patients and providers will need to commit to being citizens first and stake-holders second. This idea is not mainstream yet, but it’s increasingly common in policy circles, and I fervently hope that President Obama will make it a pillar of our health reform agenda.

Given the growing need for human services and funding challenges, how do you hope to make a difference?

I’m carving out a path in global health informatics, and I’d like to spend my career cultivating entrepreneurial educational systems that address real problems rather than just training people to get high paying jobs. For the next year, my work with FrontlineSMS:Medic will be supported by a Compton Mentor Fellowship, and subsequently I’ll attend medical school. I will definitely continue to engage in the political process, but I’m probably too unconventional in my political philosophies to run for elected office under either of the dominant political parties in the U.S. I can imagine working with the World Health Organization, but who knows? For now, I’m content working hard and listening intently for the coy knock of opportunity.

In the most recent blog post, Hart-Landsberg weighs in on the debate over nationalizing U.S. banks:

“Most analysts believe, and I see no reason to disagree, that several of our major money center banks–like Citi Bank and Bank of America–are now technically bankrupt […] Unwilling to declare these banks bankrupt, the government has been pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into them—but with little to show for it […] If we keep this up, their death spiral will drag us all down.  So—there is only one real answer—nationalize the banks that are technically bankrupt.  If we take them over we can actually figure out how bad the mess is, and develop a plan to deal with it.  We can ensure that the new managers we put in are paid a reasonable rather than exorbitant salary, and most importantly we can direct the banks to start making the loans that are needed to support the stimulus plan and get the economy going.”

Continue to read this post or explore other posts at “Reports from the Economic Front.”

“I think SAAB reflects the level of curiosity at Lewis & Clark,” said senior Ben Brysacz, SAAB chair. “It shows students’ willingness and enthusiasm for helping out other students.”

In this video, Brysacz and two student participants, seniors Katie Walter and Luke Wheeler, discuss the program. This fall, Walter received a SAAB grant to host journalists from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting at a campus event in November. Wheeler’s SAAB grant allowed him to travel to China last summer to study the rise of student nationalism ahead of the Beijing Olympics. Watch the video to learn more about SAAB and to hear the students share their thoughts about what it offers to the community.

Learn more about SAAB online.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Proctor launched a multi-institutional, multi-year collaborative research initiative, designed to further scholarly rigor and coherence in the field of environmental studies.

“Environmental studies will advance as an interdisciplinary field to the extent that it provides resources and promotes opportunities for high-quality research and exchange among its undergraduate students, who are the future generation of environmental scholars and leaders,” said Proctor.

Proctor kicked off the interdisciplinary project in spring 2008, by inviting two dozen undergraduate environmental studies majors from across the country to visit Lewis & Clark. The spring workshop provided an opportunity for participants to learn about each other’s research topics and to finalize a common rubric for interdisciplinary, situated research to afford comparison.

“Situated research is a way a student can take a broad and seemingly intractable issue and locate it somewhere—situate it—to give it context and make sense of it in time and space,” said Proctor. “It offers a means to build, store, and share research resources; it offers a connection with real-world, practical problems, providing students the opportunity to contribute to solutions for these problems; and it provides a good basis for students to compare their work between locations, leading to collaborative opportunities, and refinement and generalization of the theories they are building.”

Each student will complete a capstone project to submit to their institution’s environmental program, and present their results at a final conference at Lewis & Clark in 2010.

In this video, Proctor and several student research associates talk about the interdisciplinary approach to their projects.

This summer, Loening published a study with colleagues in the UK, detailing a major discovery the group made: an unusual, knotted protein structure.

“Typically, the 3-D structure of proteins appears like a string folded in on itself,” he explained. “If you pull on both ends of most proteins, the protein strand unties like a shoelace. When you pull at both ends of the protein we discovered, instead of unraveling it tightens and forms a knot.”

As a protein’s structure determines its function, one major area of research over the past 50 years has been directed toward studying and predicting how strands of protein fold into 3-D structures. The discovery of this unique, knotted structure generates new questions about how proteins form.

“The structure that we determined in this project underscores how much we still have to learn about protein folding,” Loening said.

Beginning this fall, Loening will bring his expertise to bear on a different, consequential question, this time regarding proteins from brown recluse spiders. With the support of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Loening will collaborate with Greta Binford, assistant professor of biology, to investigate the structure and function of proteins contained in spider venom toxins.

The $190,000 Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) Program Grant from the NIH will allow the team to engage in a three-year study of the peptides and proteins in brown recluse spider venom, which may have practical applications in the pharmaceutical industry.

“Brown recluse spider venoms contain hundreds of different toxins that target neurons and cause different reactions in victims—from injury to paralysis to death,” Loening said. “We want to study the specific effects of each of these toxins and we hope that, by determining their structures, we can gain some insight into how they operate. Since these toxins interfere with the nervous system, they can potentially be used in a controlled way to produce practical applications in medicine, such as a naturally derived, non-addictive pain reliever.”

Environmental studies researchers at Lewis & Clark believe the possibility of such connections is worth closer examination. They are conducting focus groups with Oregonians from urban, suburban, rural and intentional communities to ask them to define their connection to nature and how it affects them personally. The research title, Ecotopia Revisited, plays on the 1975 novel Ecotopia, which portrays a future ecologically sustainable society located in the Pacific Northwest.

“Most utopian and dystopian discourse points outward to the worlds it describes—in the ecological realm, for instance, the dream of a sustainable society and the nightmare of global warming typically emphasize how to achieve sustainability, how to stop global warming,” writes Jim Proctor, research lead and director of environmental studies. “Yet the key question we ask in Ecotopia Revisited is: what do our contemporary utopias and dystopias tell us about ourselves?”

Along with Proctor, postdoctoral fellow Evan Berry and CAS ‘08 graduates Meagan Nuss and Amber Shasky are blogging about their discoveries and insights as they talk with Oregonians.

In this video, Marzulla and Depper talk about their summer research experience, working with Greta Binford, assistant professor of biology, to understand the evolutionary processes that have led to the widespread, diverse brown recluse spider population. Found in the Americas, Africa, and Mediterranean Europe, the brown recluse has been known to bite, causing lesions in human tissue. Marzulla and Depper are examining DNA sequences and analyzing the enzymatic activity of the spider’s venom to improve treatment and diagnosis of bites.

Rogers Program participants begin their summer research internships in May, working at least 40 hours per week, for 10 weeks. Each research group discusses their research with science faculty during a series of brown-bag lunch presentations on Wednesdays throughout June and July. At the end of the summer, each team writes a research paper discussing their findings and prepares a poster to present in the fall to local, regional, national and international scientific meetings.

The Rogers Summer Science Poster session happens on Tuesday, September 30, at 4:30 p.m. in Smith Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

As a member of the American Law Institute (ALI), an organization comprised of accomplished judges, practicing lawyers, and legal scholars, Klonoff has served on the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation project, which is charged with evaluating the class action process and providing recommendations that ensure fairness to the class bringing the suit and improve the efficiency of the process. Klonoff is one of four Reporters responsible for drafting the project. He is the principal author of the chapter on aggregate settlements.

Through an arduous research and review process that takes, on average, seven years to complete, ALI drafts and publishes Principles, Restatements of the Law, model codes, and legal studies to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs. The organization’s recommendations carry great weight in the legal community.

While the project is still two or three years from completion, important sections of the project have already been tentatively approved by the ALI membership. In addition, Klonoff has been giving presentations on the project to members of the legal community across the United States and internationally. He has recently presented at an international class action conference in Florence, Italy; at the Practising Law Institute conference in New York City; and at a conference of 150 state court appellate judges in Chicago.

Though tens of thousands of nanoparticles could fit across a strand of hair, Bentley will attempt to corral them into thin films using a technique called electrochemical deposition. By studying the growth of the nanoparticle-containing films, Bentley hopes to generate a new method of organizing nanoparticles so that they can be used in products ranging from sensors to advanced batteries.

“The tiny size of my research subject by no means represents its significance,” Bentley said. “What we learn through this project could greatly affect technology, and I hope that students working in my research lab gain skills that will help them in their scientific careers.”

Last year, Bentley received one of only eight Faculty Start-up Awards given by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The $30,000, five-year award allows Bentley to offer student assistants research stipends.

The NSF funding will facilitate Bentley’s outreach to undergraduate researchers at both Lewis & Clark and Portland Community College, where she hopes to foster new general chemistry laboratory curricula on nanoscale chemistry.