Timothy Kraft, Ph.D., is looking down the barrel of a gun. A small, black target stands 150 feet away, but Kraft isn’t focusing on the target. He’s focusing on the pistol in his hand; not the part of the gun he can see, but the part that isn’t there at all.
Kraft, an investigator in UAB’s Vision Science Research Center, is developing a new kind of gunsight that relies on a trick of the eye to improve a shooter’s aim. In this slideshow, he explains how the secret to better marksmanship may be to let the mind fill in the blanks.
Kudzu root extract could provide a novel treatment for metabolic syndrome, according to a new report from UAB researchers.
It sure seemed like a good idea at the time. In the 1930s, farmers and government agents across the American South sowed fields with a popular new Asian import called kudzu that promised to help fight devastating erosion problems. The fast-growing plant, native to Japan and China, bloomed in the hospitable Southern climate and quickly ran wild. In 1972, it was officially declared a weed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Today, the “vine that ate the South” has gobbled more than 10 million acres. In the right conditions, it can grow up to a foot a day and as much as 60 feet per year—so fast, in the words of poet James Dickey, “that you must close your windows at night to keep it out of the house.”
But this much-maligned invader may contain a beneficial surprise. In findings published in August in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, UAB researchers reported that an edible extract from kudzu’s roots may help regulate high blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose—all contributors to metabolic syndrome, a condition that affects 50 million Americans and is particularly pervasive in the South.
What kindles the spark of creativity? David Sweatt, Ph.D., finds that question doubly interesting. As neurobiology chair, director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute at UAB, and Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging, Sweatt investigates the cellular and chemical mechanisms of learning and memory. And as an abstract painter, he is curious about the possible biological basis for his vivid ideas.
In this slideshow, Sweatt shares his thoughts on the possible relationship between neurobiology and creativity.
More than 800 million miles from Earth, the space orbiter Cassini is busy shooting pictures of the planet Saturn and its moons. Thousands of these in-flight images are available online on Cassini’s home page—but the spacecraft’s oeuvre includes many recordings that cannot be appreciated with human eyes alone. They’re snapshots of data gathered by an onboard instrument called the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS), which records measurements of reflected UV light that is invisible to humans. On Earth, UV rays can be harmful, but in space, UV data is immensely useful to astronomers measuring the composition of distant planets.
Right now, NASA scientists don’t have a way to effectively interpret the UVIS data Cassini is relaying, so they’ve tapped UAB physicist Perry Gerakines, Ph.D., to help. He was awarded a three-year, $408,000 grant to create thin, icy films of materials thought to be on Saturn’s moons and then analyze them with a custom-built UVIS of his own. “We’re going to measure these spectra—the way different compounds absorb and reflect light—in the hopes that we can use them to interpret the spectra we see from the icy moons on the rings of Saturn,” Gerakines says.
After years of isolation and poverty, Alabama’s MOWA Choctaw tribe is reclaiming its roots—with the help of UAB alumna Jacqueline Matte and UAB anthropologist Loretta Cormier.
Thirty years ago, UAB alumna Jacqueline Matte went out to the Choctaw reservation in southwest Alabama in search of a story. What she found has haunted her ever since, fueling decades of interviews, investigations, and heartache. Nine years ago, UAB anthropologist Loretta Cormier, Ph.D., joined the struggle. Separately and together, Matte and Cormier have fought through swamps both literal and legal, seeking clues to one of the great vanishing acts in Alabama history. It is no easy task; after all, they are looking for a people who haven’t wanted to be found for more than 150 years.
The Alabama Choctaw lived in poverty and isolation until the 1940s, when they began sending some of their children to Indian schools in other states because their own were not accredited. When those educated children came home, they led the tribe out of isolation and into the public eye, launching a campaign for state recognition. In 1979, they officially became the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians, the first recognized tribe in Alabama. (The name MOWA comes from the tribe's location on the Mobile County-Washington County line.) The following year, the tribe began to seek federal recognition, a lengthy and involved process requiring extensive genealogical research. That is where Jacqueline Matte comes in.
