Inquiring Minds By David Brooks Illustrations by Adam McCauley

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In this issue:

Oil on Water
To clean up spills in the Arctic Sea, call in the bugs

From a one-celled organism's point of view, Arctic sea ice is a lot like New Hampshire granite underground: cold and riddled with twisty little water-filled passages that make interesting places to live. This is all well and good for the microbes but complicates life for those who want to make them do useful things, like help clean oil spills from ships.

First, however, researchers need to understand the big picture about these little organisms. "At this point, it's not so much about finding an immediate solution. Our research is about understanding the system," says Joe Cunningham '03, '08G, a research project engineer at the Coastal Response Research Center.

Founded in 2004 as a joint project between UNH and NOAA, the center was designed to find better ways to fight spills of oil and other pollution in marine environments. Such spills have been relatively uncommon in areas of the ocean that freeze in winter because so little commercial traffic or drilling occurs there. That is likely to change as shrinking Arctic ice allows the expansion of regular shipping traffic and drilling northward.

When oil spills in the Arctic are trapped by freezing sea water, it creates what is called an "oil-ice sandwich." Part of the clean-up could include bioremediation, using naturally occurring bacteria to "eat" the oil. Center co-director Nancy Kinner '80G, '83G, professor of civil engineering, says this is standard practice in warmer water but poorly understood in ice.

"The first time I touched Arctic ice, I was surprised," says Cunningham. "It's different from freshwater ice. It's very porous." That comes from brine pockets and channels, passages with diameters of less than 1 millimeter filled with salty water. Brine can make up nearly one-third the volume of sea ice, creating a vast ecosystem for microscopic life, which has parallels to the water-filled cracks found in granite.

Cunningham is studying a variety of ocean-dwelling bacteria and protists, unicellular organisms that like to eat bacteria that live in the brine channels of ice.

He's concentrating on the complicated interplay between bacteria and protists to see what conditions work best. If there are too few protists, bacteria populations grow and then crash, so they can't do much oil remediation. If too many protists exist, bacteria populations can't grow at all. Finding the balance is tough, and it's much tougher in ice.

Happily, Cunningham's master's thesis was about protistan predation in a fractured rock aquifer, providing insight that he hopes to transfer to sea ice. By spring 2010, after solving some pesky problems related to keeping microbial systems thriving in a lab that's perpetually at 41 degrees Fahrenheit, he should be mixing bacteria, protists and oil in various recipes.

"It's one of those paradoxes—with the protists you have problems with them grazing the type of bacteria you need, but without the protists you don't have as efficient a bacterial community," Cunningham says. It's possible, he muses, that to be successful, cleanup efforts must limit wintertime protists, since in confined brine channels, they're efficient at eating the oil trapped in the ice. But he'll also need to encourage summertime protists—in open water they're needed to keep bacteria populations from exploding and crashing.

As oil exploration and shipping increase in the world's last hydrocarbon frontier, Cunningham's and Kinner's research may help clean up vulnerable arctic ecosystems.

Count Off
Can signs of autism be spotted in the very young?

Hand a plastic hammer to a 1-year-old, and what does the baby do? Bang things with it, of course—what else would you expect? Shelley Mulligan, associate professor of occupational therapy, thinks she can learn a lot by watching the behavior of babies, and hopes her research will help identify children with autism at a much earlier age.

"Research shows that early intervention is important for kids with autism," she says, regarding an ongoing project at UNH's Seacoast Child Development Clinic that she is conducting with Rae Sonnenmeier of the communication sciences and disorders department and Ann Donoghue Dillon '75, '98G from the Institute on Disability.

Autism is not usually diagnosed until ages 2 to 4, partly because typical signs of autism such as repetitive behavior or difficulty socializing don't appear until then.

The researchers are observing 25 children who have older siblings with autism and as a result have a higher probability—10 to 20 percent, versus 1 percent in the general public—of having autism themselves. Mulligan is most interested in observing sensory processing behaviors such as how they react to loud or bright toys, and their motor behaviors, such as how they move and manipulate toys when placed on the floor. The babies are given other standardized tests of development, and the parents fill out questionnaires about their progress.

To quantify the sensory motor behaviors, mothers are videotaped playing with and spoon-feeding their infants at home. The videos are then examined for 22 behaviors, which are coded as being present or absent during every 30 seconds of tape. The process required developing objective, "operationalized definitions" of the behaviors. For example, a hand manipulation means "a change of position of the object in the hand, not just grasping, holding it and then releasing it," says Mulligan.

The results may eventually reveal patterns that act as markers. Preliminary results are promising. The team has been following the babies at 6, 12, 18 and 30 months of age. "With 6-month-olds, it's not obvious that we're seeing any signs, while with 12- and 18-month-olds, we're seeing some subtle signs," says Mulligan. "At 12 months, the high-risk babies are very interested in the visual properties of objects, and change positions less often when on the floor."

The goal, of course, is to help children with autism and their families, and early detection is key. Autism is a complex neurodevelopmental condition, but Mulligan is cautiously hopeful that children with this "different wiring" can be helped to adapt, and ultimately live productive and satisfying lives. "We're seeing some nice results from aggressive early intervention, children who are functioning really, really well," she says. "I think the parents should be very optimistic about the future of these children."

Trash Talk
A lot can be learned by digging up garbage

Meghan Howey has drawn a lot of conclusions—some controversial—about Anishinaabek tribal groups living in Michigan between 1200 and 1600 A.D. Her evidence comes from pottery fragments, bear claws, post holes and 1,500-year-old "crud" on cooking pots. "Your trash tells more of the truth about you than what you write down," says the UNH assistant professor of anthropology, who has completed the first summer of field work on an NSF-funded project. "In most societies, it's only the elite who write. You only get one version of events." And the history of the Anishinaabek—groups later named Ojibway and Ottawa by the French—was first written by colonial Europeans.

Howey's project is located in a 10,000-acre preserve near Douglas Lake in Northern Michigan, where prehistoric artifacts abound just beneath a forest floor that has been undisturbed for more than a thousand years. She brought with her a crew of a dozen students from five universities.

Previous digs in the region revealed a wide distribution of similar pottery styles and tools that predated 1200. Howey believes the results of her dig—including a large pot fragment dating to the 1400s unearthed by Justin Linxweiler '10—indicate that free migration and interaction among the Anishinaabek changed around 1200, when some groups claimed land along Lake Huron, where it was warm enough to grow maize. Other groups then lost easy access not only to corn but also the abundant fisheries in the great lakes. Near Douglas Lake, she hypothesizes, the people hunkered down economically and socially, storing food in hundreds of cache pits, which she has been unearthing with her students. The distinctive local pottery and tools, as well as analysis of food residue in pots—with large proportions of acorns in relation to maize—all indicate to Howey that the tribe stayed put. She also thinks their rituals were familial and domestic, as evidenced by artifacts unearthed near hearths, such as bear claws and beaver teeth, still considered totemic by Native Americans in Michigan today.

Howey thinks another similar tribal group in central Michigan worked hard to maintain access to coastal resources through public ceremonies and ritual at the Missaukee earthworks, prehistoric structures long believed to have been forts. Her theories on the earthworks and the origin of religious rituals known as Mide—which conflict with the ethnohistory of these tribes written by European colonists—has sparked heated debate in the journal American Antiquity.

Howey will take students into the field in Michigan again next summer, but eventually she hopes to initiate field work in the university's own backyard, perhaps at Durham Point. No doubt she will continue to look to trash in her efforts to learn the truth about prehistoric peoples, even if it is at odds with what others have written. ~