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Following IMPACT 10x10x10’s launch earlier this year, Stony Brook University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., MD today announced that he has joined UN Women’s HeForShe solidarity movement as an IMPACT 10x10x10 champion, making Stony Brook University one of 10 universities around the world committing to take bold game-changing action to achieve gender equality within and beyond their institutions. This work will be done in partnership with UN Women, the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. On Sept. 20, 2014, UN Women introduced HeForShe, which aims to mobilize one billion men and boys in support of gender equality.

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Climate and plant community instability may have hampered the success of dinosaurs in the tropics during the Late Triassic Period (235-201 million years ago), according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). This finding was reached by co-author Alan H. Turner, PhD, of Stony Brook University, and an international team of scientists by examining the sedimentary rocks and fossil record preserved in the Chinle Formation in northern New Mexico to investigate the environment in tropical latitudes during the Late Triassic.

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Stony Brook University has entered into a licensing agreement with a startup company, CadheRx Therapeutics, to develop and market an anti-cancer technology discovered by Sabine Brouxhon, MD, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Stony Brook University School of Medicine. The technology involves use of an antibody-based cancer therapy that down-regulates a plethora of pathways associated with resistant disease. The approach could advance treatment for patients with many forms of cancer, including breast, colorectal, lung, skin, and other epithelial-derived cancers.

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A team of scientists have taken quantum teleportation – a method of communicating information from one location to another without having to physically move it – to a higher level by using certain high-dimensional states (which they dubbed “donut” states) for teleportation. Stony Brook University physicist Tzu-Chieh Wei, PhD, and colleagues nationally demonstrated that their method works, is more reliable than previous teleportation schemes, and could be a stepping stone toward building a quantum communications network. Their findings appear in Nature Communications.

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Are males truly essential for reproduction? Female birds, reptiles and sharks living in captivity have sometimes surprised their keepers by giving birth even though, as far as anyone can remember, they have never been housed with a male. Scientists used DNA analysis to solve this mystery some time ago, showing that these offspring were produced by asexual reproduction, a process called parthenogenesis, or “virgin birth.” Although these events have captured tremendous public interest, it was unknown if this ever occurred in wild populations of these animals.

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It’s like a superpower, a TV with static, a brain-cleaning system, a study hall, a practice session for video games. Those were just some of the metaphors used to explain sleep by the winners of Stony Brook University’s Flame Challenge contest, announced today by Alan Alda.

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Dinosaurs grew as fast as your average living mammal, according to a research paper published by Stony Brook University paleontologist Michael D’Emic, PhD. The paper, to published in Science on May 29, is a re-analysis of a widely publicized 2014 Science paper on dinosaur metabolism and growth that concluded dinosaurs were neither ectothermic nor endothermic—terms popularly simplified as ‘cold-blooded’ and ‘warm-blooded’—but instead occupied an intermediate category.

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Removing accumulated mutant p53 protein from a cancer model showed that tumors regress significantly and survival increases. This finding, by an international team of cancer researchers led by Ute Moll, MD, Professor of Pathology at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, is reported in a paper published advanced online May 25 in Nature.

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At Stony Brook University’s 55th commencement ceremony today at Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium, 6,298 students had their degrees conferred, becoming the University’s newest alumni. They joined more than 155,000 of their forerunners around the globe whose lives and work personify the mission of Stony Brook

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Our ancestors were making stone tools some 700,000 years earlier than we thought. That’s the finding co-led by Stony Brook University's Drs. Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis—who have found the earliest stone artifacts, dating 3.3 million years ago.

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A virtual-heart platform proposed to improve and accelerate medical-device development and testing has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the amount of $4.2 million over five years.

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Everyone knows that 60 is the new 50. But now, Warren Sanderson, a Professor of Economics at Stony Brook University, and Sergei Scherbov, a project leader at an Austrian research institute, have written an article about future population projections for Europe up to the year 2050 published in PLOS ONE, which shows that, counterintuitively, population aging is slower when life expectancy increase is faster – 60 really is the new 50.

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​ Stony Brook University will confer honorary degrees this year upon three luminaries who have established remarkable legacies in their respective fields. Long Island’s Piano Man, William Martin Joel, will receive a Doctor of Music;world renowned computer scientist Professor Ben Shneiderman, a two-time Stony Brook alumnus who pioneered the human-computer interaction and the highlighted textual link, will receive a Doctor of Science; and one of Long Island’s most prolific businessmen and philanthropists, Charles B. Wang, will receive a Doctor of Humane Letters. All three will don academic regalia along with nearly 6,000 students as they join in the University’s 55th Commencement ceremon​ies​.

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A new mathematical model that uses drug-target kinetics to predict how drugs work in vivo may provide a foundation to improve drug discovery, which is frequently hampered by the inability to predict effective doses of drugs. The discovery by Peter Tonge, a Professor of Chemistry and Radiology, and Director of Infectious Disease Research at the Institute for Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (ICB & DD) at Stony Brook University, along with collaborators at Stony Brook University and AstraZeneca, will be published advanced online on April 20 in Nature Chemical Biology.

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Henry Woo, MD, Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Neurological Surgery, Director of the Cerebrovascular Center and Co-Director of the Cerebrovascular and Stroke Center at Stony Brook Medicine’s Neurosciences Institute, along with other national leaders in neurosurgery, strongly endorse interventional thrombectomy in the treatment of acute ischemic stroke secondary to emergent large brain vessel occlusions in a paper to be published March 31 online in the Journal of Neurosurgery.

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Did you know that one organ donor can save up to eight lives? And that could be extremely helpful given the fact that in New York State alone, over 10,000 people are waiting for organ transplants, according to LiveOnNY (formally the New York Organ Donor Network). More than 8,000 people await kidneys; over 1,300 need livers; and more than 300 need hearts.

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Peter M. Small, MD, Deputy Director of the Tuberculosis Delivery Program for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been appointed as Founding Director of the Stony Brook University Global Health Institute (GHI) effective August 1, 2015, announced President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., MD. Established in 2013 with a $10 million philanthropic commitment to endow the Institute based on Stony Brook’s main campus, the Global Health Institute was conceived as a university-wide interdisciplinary research center to drive cutting-edge, health-improvement-oriented research in Madagascar, an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Southeast Africa with which Stony Brook University has a near 30-year history and deep ties. Madagascar is a vital research site for initiatives that will benefit the world because of its rich biodiversity.

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A team of scientists including Minghua Zhang, Dean and Director of Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS), have found that the size of tropical cyclones is controlled by their underlying sea-surface temperatures (SST) relative to the conditions of the mean SST within the surrounding tropical zone of the storms. Their findings, published early online in Nature Communications, imply that under a warmer climate, the size of tropical cyclones (including hurricanes), are not based on the absolute value of SST alone.

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Traverse Biosciences has signed an exclusive, worldwide license agreement with the Research Foundation for the State University of New York to develop a drug to treat canine periodontal disease. The potential therapy would fulfill an unmet medical need, as periodontitis affects approximately 80 percent of dogs by the age of three and leads to tooth loss. The drug candidate comes from a discovery by Stony Brook University scientists who have developed a library of proprietary agents designed to treat inflammation.

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A team of astronomy researchers from Stony Brook University, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and Tsuru University are the first to reveal clear details about the rapidly changing plasma tail of the comet C/2013 R1 (Lovejoy). The observation and details behind the discovery are published in a paper in the March 2015 edition of the Astronomical Journal.

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Evolution is change, and not always for the better. Evolution, in fact, is at the core of many of the diseases that are hardest to treat. Pathogens such as bacteria and parasites evade their host’s defenses or antimicrobial drugs through evolution. Cancer itself in an evolutionary process, whereby “rogue” cells evolve to grow beyond their normal barriers, migrate to distant locations in the body, and ultimately evade chemotherapy.

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Lukasz Fidkowski, PhD, an assistant professor of physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, has been selected to receive a 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He is one of 126 awardees from 61 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada chosen for this prestigious honor, which comes with a $50,000 two-year fellowship to further his research.

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The Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) at Stony Brook University will host the International Conference on Masculinities: Engaging Men and Boys for Gender Equality, a four-day symposium to encourage men’s activism in support of gender justice and increase cooperation between feminist activists and academic researchers who address these issues.

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A team of Stony Brook University researchers have identified fatty acid binding proteins (FABPs) as intracellular transporters for two ingredients in marijuana, THC and CBD (cannabidiol). The finding, published early online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, is significant because it helps explain how CBD works within the cells. Recent clinical findings have shown that CBD may help reduce seizures and could be a potential new medicine to treat pediatric treatment-resistant epilepsy.

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An international team of scientists, including Minghua Zhang, Dean and Director of Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS), has found that man-made aerosol emissions from industrial processes have changed the relationship between temperature and precipitation in the northing tropics. The findings, published early online in Nature Geoscience, may help to indicate the shifts in seasonal rainfall in Central America, which is critical for agriculture in the region.

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U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Ernest Moniz today dedicated the world’s most advanced light source, the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The NSLS-II is a $912-million DOE Office of Science User Facility that produces extremely bright beams of x-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared light used to examine a wide range of materials, including superconductors and catalysts, geological samples, and biological proteins to accelerate advances in energy, environmental science, and medicine.

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Heart disease is often thought of as a health problem for men, but more and more women die of heart disease each year than men, and from any other disease including breast cancer. One challenge is that some heart disease symptoms in women may be different from those in men.

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A visible and growing number of transgender children in North America live in alignment with their gender identity rather than their natal sex, yet scientific research has largely ignored them. No longer, says Nicholas Eaton, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University. Dr. Eaton and his colleagues at the TransYouth Project have started the first large-scale, national study of socially-supported transgender kids.

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Our existence depends on a bit of evolutionary genius aptly nicknamed “fight or flight.” But where in our brain does the alarm first go off, and what other parts of the brain are mobilized to express fear and remember to avoid danger in the future?

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Scientists at Stony Brook University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are using pioneering x-ray techniques to map internal atomic transformations of the highly conductive silver matrix formation within lithium-based batteries that may lead to the design of more efficient batteries. Their findings are published online today in the journal Science.

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A Stony Brook University research team has been awarded $2 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to develop an active air conditioning vent capable of modulating airflow distribution, velocity, and temperature designed for commercial or residential units. Led by Ya Wang, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the goal of the project is to create a vent that results in up to 30 percent energy savings through directed localization of existing building heating/cooling output.

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In early December, the Center of Disease Control officials warned that the year's flu season could result in more fatalities than in other years. CDC Director Tom Frieden noted that the dominant flu strain circulating this season, H3N2, tends to lead to a greater number of hospitalizations and fatalities than other strains. About half of the flu samples tested in the early stages of this year's flu season were a new H3 subtype of the virus that this year's vaccine is not well prepared to fight.

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Fire consumes wood ferociously, in a deadly blaze—but the substances used to treat wood to resist burning can also be noxious and toxic. A Stony Brook University Materials Science Professor guided an undergraduate and two Long Island high school students as they developed a patent-pending, environmentally sustainable way to render the wood used in construction flame retardant—and 5x stronger—using natural materials.

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It’s the ‘most wonderful time of the year’ – but it is also one of the busiest times of year for the Suffolk County Volunteer Firefighters Burn Center at Stony Brook University Hospital. As the holidays approach, doctors at the Burn Center are urging people to take extra precautions and to eliminate potential dangers that could lead to serious burn injuries. “Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, we see a significant increase in patients coming in with burns,” said Steven Sandoval, MD, Medical Director, Suffolk County Volunteer Firefighters Burn Center, Stony Brook University Hospital. “Holiday celebrations should be full of joy, but if not careful, could quickly turn tragic.” Dr. Sandoval says many of these burns and injuries can be preventable and shares some tips for a safe holiday season.

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Laurie T. Krug is the first early career scientist to be named Stony Brook University Discovery Prize Fellow, a new philanthropically-sponsored award established to fund high-risk, high-reward basic research projects. Krug was named today following a “Shark Tank”-meets-“TED Talk”-styled competition at the Simons Foundation headquarters in New York City. Krug was selected from one of four finalists for her project that researches herpes viruses that are associated with cancer and the idea of delivering molecular scissors to the site of virus infection using nanoparticles.

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The flu, or seasonal influenza virus, is extremely unpredictable. Its severity can vary widely from one season to the next depending on many things, including the strains of flu spreading, availability of vaccines, how many people get vaccinated and how well the flu vaccine is matched to the flu viruses circulating each season. For these reasons, especially with recent news out of the CDC last week, many may be wondering, “should I be concerned about this flu season?”

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The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University is challenging scientists to answer an eye-opening question: What is sleep? That is the wake-up call for scientists in this year’s edition of the Flame Challenge. In this international contest, scientists – from graduate students to senior researchers – are challenged to communicate complex science in ways that will interest and enlighten 11-year-olds, who judge the contest.

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Nuclear power is part of the worldwide energy mix, accounting for around 10% of global electricity supply. Safety is the paramount issue. Uranium dioxide (UO2) is the major nuclear fuel component of fission reactors, and the concern during severe accidents is the melting and leakage of radioactive UO2 as it corrodes through its protective containment systems. Understanding—in order to predict—the behavior of UO2 at extreme temperatures is crucial to improved safety and optimization of this electricity source.

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A team of Stony Brook University researchers has been awarded 50 million hours on the Titan Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, to advance their research on modeling of astrophysical explosions. The two-year project, titled, “Approaching Exascale Models of Astrophysical Explosions,” led by Astronomy Professor Michael Zingale in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, stems from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment award (INCITE), which provides the supercomputing hours.

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Major depressive disorder (MDD) should be re-conceptualized as an infectious disease, according to Turhan Canli, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology and Radiology at Stony Brook University. In a paper published in Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders, Dr.Canli suggests that major depression may result from parasitic, bacterial, or viral infection. He presents examples that illustrate possible pathways by which these microorganisms could contribute to the etiology of MDD.

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Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC (BSA) has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to continue managing and operating Brookhaven National Laboratory under a new five-year base contract. Established as a partnership between Battelle and Stony Brook University, BSA has managed Brookhaven Lab since 1998.

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A newly discovered 66–70 million-year-old groundhog-like creature, massive in size compared to other mammals of its era, provides new and important insights into early mammalian evolution.

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Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. That’s what the Stony Brook Foundation did in establishing The Discovery Fund, which supports pioneering scientific breakthroughs with philanthropic giving in response to declining federal grants for basic research. Now, the finalists for the inaugural Discovery Fund Award have been selected and will compete for up to $200,000; the recipient(s) of which will be announced immediately following their presentations which will take place on Thursday, December 11 in New York City.

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A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B finds that people are quick to change their moral values depending on which rule means more cash for them instead of others

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When it comes to Halloween, our doctors have seen it all — from allergic reactions to candy to traffic accidents. Most are preventable! Experts at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital share their best tips for keeping your children healthy and safe while trick or treating and more:

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Scientific inquiry is a hit and miss proposition, subject to constant checking and rechecking. Recently, a new class of materials was discovered called topological insulators—nonmetallic materials with a metallic surface capable of conducting electrons. The effect, based on relativity theory, exists only in special materials—those with heavy elements—and has the potential to revolutionize electronics.

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The proteins that drive DNA replication—the force behind cellular growth and reproduction—are some of the most complex machines on Earth. The multistep replication process involves hundreds of atomic-scale moving parts that rapidly interact and transform. Mapping that dense molecular machinery is one of the most promising and challenging frontiers in medicine and biology.