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January 25, 2008 Cornell Chronicle The bride wore white and, maybe, less weight – but study shows she may have gone to extreme measures for that svelte look By SuSan S. Lang Order flowers, invitations, band and food, rent a reception hall, plan the honeymoon and buy a wedding dress. And drop more than 20 pounds before the big day. That last mission is on the minds of more than 70 percent of brides-to-be, reports a new Cornell study. And more than one-third of them use such extreme measures as diet pills, fasting or skipping meals to achieve their desired weddingday weight. Of women surveyed who had already bought their bridal gowns, 14 percent purposely bought a wedding dress one or more sizes smaller than their then-current dress size. “Most women engaged-to-be-married idealize a wedding weight much lighter than their current weight,” reports Lori Neighbors, Ph.D. ‘07, now an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of National Academy of Sciences honors Tom Eisner By SuSan S. Lang www.news.cornell.edu Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She conducted the study with 272 engaged women, working with her mentor, Jeffery Sobal, Cornell professor of nutritional sociology in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, while she was a graduate student at Cornell. The study, now online at , will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Appetite. In the study, 91 percent of the women wanted to either lose weight (70 percent of the total) or prevent weight gain (21 percent), compared with national data showing that 53 percent of women in a similar age range want to lose weight and 9 percent want to avoid gaining weight. “Thus, it appears that an upcoming wedding may lead more women to engage in weight-management efforts than they otherwise would,” Neighbors said. Drinking water was the most common weight-loss technique (almost 80 percent used it) brides-to-be used, followed by aerobic exercise and eating less. Nationally, only 34 percent of women trying to lose weight and 23 percent trying to avoid weight gain report using water as a weight-loss strategy. “It is not clear whether women are using this particular strategy to increase feelings of fullness, avoid the consumption of other foods or displace higher calorie beverages,” said Sobal. The average idealized weight for all the engaged women was 16 pounds less than istockphoto.com their then-current weight. Of women who wanted to lose weight, their average desired weight loss was 23 pounds; 40 percent used at least one extreme weight control behavior and 25 percent used two or more. “While this study suggests that weight is an important aspect of wedding appearance for women in this sample, nutrition and/or exercise interventions tailored to women preparing for their wedding may be beneficial to discourage the use of extreme weight loss behaviors and promote healthy, long-term weight management during the transition into marriage,” said Neighbors. The research was partially supported by a National Institutes of Health grant. Classics and rarities: Schwartz Center’s new season By DanieL aLoi The Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts’ 20th anniversary season in 2008-09 will celebrate accomplished Cornellians while taking on the wit of Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare alongside new plays and rarely performed works. “This is a celebration of the core mission that we have to use the power of theater, film and dance to create real and significant contributions to the educational, spiritual and aesthetic life of the campus and community,” said David Feldshuh, artistic director of the Schwartz Center. The season, announced at a reception Jan. 23 at the center, will engage returning Cornell directors, designers, dancers, playwrights and “successful members of the film community, to teach and speak and communicate with our students,” Feldshuh said. The lineup: • “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Wilde’s comic satire of upper-crust Victorian society, in which two friends escape family obligations, create chaos and risk all to win their true loves. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will present Thomas Eisner, a world authority on animal behavior, ecology and evolution and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Chemical Ecology at Cornell, with the 2008 John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science. Cited “for pathbreaking studies of the myriad ways that organisms utilize chemistry to mediate ecological interactions and providing a foundation for the field of chemical ecology,” Eisner will be awarded a medal at an April ceremony and $25,000. Eisner is one of 13 recipients of awards from the NAS to recognize “extraordinary scientific achievements” in the areas of biology, chemistry, solar physics, ecology, mathematics, oceanography, paleontology, social sciences and psychology. The award was established by the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. in honor of telephone pioneer John J. • “God’s Ear” by emerging playwright Jenny Schwartz ’95, to be directed by Sam Gold ’00. Schwartz garnered praise from The New York Times for her drama about a family’s strained relationships while coping with unimaginable tragedy. An offoff-Broadway success, it will open off-Broadway in April. • “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Shakespeare’s comedy of temptation vs. sworn self-denial is one of his earliest works and is highly regarded for its wordplay, language and wit. It is also difficult and seldom produced. • “The Body Project” by Leslie Jacobson and Vanessa Thomas. An intriguing play with music, exploring the disconnect between empowered modern women and their dissatisfaction with their bodies and self-image. Inspired by a book of the same title by Cornell’s Joan Jacobs Brumberg, professor of history, human development and gender studies, the play will be directed by Emily Ranii ‘07 and was created with assistance from women of all ages in workshops involving improvisation, writing exercises and interviews. • “The History Boys” by Alan Bennett. The recent Broadway and West End hit play won six Tony Awards Carty and has been awarded since 1932. Eisner, director of the Cornell Insti- Eisner tute for Research in Chemical Ecology, is a field biologist and a pioneer of chemical ecology, the study of chemical interactions between organisms, from the millipede to the bombardier beetle to the garden slug. With Cornell collaborators, he has chronicled in scientific papers, books and on film studies of insects and how they mate, trap their prey and defend themselves. He is author or co-author of nine books, including “For Love of Insects,” winner of the Best Science Book in the 2004 Independent Publisher Book Awards. An active conservationist, Eisner also is former president of the Xerces Society, the only organization devoted to the preservation of invertebrates. and the Laurence Olivier Award. It follows the fortunes of eight bright and funny English boys in pursuit of sex, sports and a spot at Oxford. • Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” a regional premiere of this rarely performed opera, also marks the 90th anniversary of the composer’s birth. An exploration of a crisis in faith and based on a Catholic mass, the production combines music, dance and theater with more than 150 performers on stage, featuring the Cornell Glee Club, a children’s choir and multimedia. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and choreographed by Alvin Ailey, “Mass” was the first performance at the Kennedy Center in 1971. Other events in the works for the 20th anniversary season include a Theatre Studies Symposium – a weekend of presentations, panels and noted Cornell alumni in theater studies – and the Heermans-McCalmon Play Reading, with six alumni playwrights as special guests for two days of workshops, readings and performance. Season subscriptions are available at the Schwartz Center box office or by calling (607) 254-ARTS. Houck receives Weber award for career of instrument development By Lauren goLD James Houck, the Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy, is the recipient of the 2008 Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation from the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Houck was cited for his distinguished record of developing infrared instruments for observations from both the ground and space, culminating in the infrared spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Weber award recognizes individuals of any nationality “for the design, invention or significant improvement of instrumentation ... leading to advances in astronomy.” Houck received the award at the annual meeting of the AAS in Austin, Texas, earlier this month. The infrared spectrograph, one of three instruments on the orbiting telescope, detects infrared radiation from distant objects, allowing researchers to determine their chemical composition based on the way the emitted light is distributed along the spectrum. The spectrograph, which is 100 times more sensitive than its predecessors, gives astronomers a unique view that penetrates thick clouds of dust deep in the universe, offering new insight into such processes as the formation of stars, galaxies and planetary systems. The Spitzer Space Telescope, the fourth and last of NASA’s Great Observatories, was launched in 2003 and is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. built the infrared spectrograph under Houck’s direction. Houck, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1969, also received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2005 for his work on the spectrograph, as well as the same medal in 1984 for developing the detectors on the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, Spitzer’s predecessor. He is also a past recipient of Cornell’s Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching.
science & research Tale of a wasp, a caterpillar and a fungus ends with more dominating female wasps By KriShna ramanujan ZDRAVko koLEV illustration of the parasitic wasp Cotesia melitaearum. Larvae of the wasp live inside the checkerspot caterpillar (Melitaea cinxia), eventually killing it. Understanding survival of a species can be a lot more complicated than meets the eye because ecosystems are so interrelated. Take, for example, a parasitic wasp that grows up inside a checkerspot butterfly caterpillar, eventually killing the caterpillar. In a recent study, a Cornell researcher discovered that host caterpillars that eat fungus-infected plants harbor more female than male wasp larvae by two-to-one. That’s good for the survival of the wasp because only the females are able to colonize more new host caterpillars. This is essential in their fragmented habitat. Indeed, the researcher found that over six years, a butterfly population was more than twice as likely to be colonized by the wasp if the local plants were infected with fungus than if the plants were healthy. That’s bad for the survival of the butterfly, which is already an endangered species, because its populations become more vulnerable to parasites. “The fungus affects the wasp through two intermediary species, a plant and a caterpillar,” said Saskya van Nouhuys, a Cornell visiting assistant professor for the last decade in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences. “It’s exciting because the plant’s Bassuk to be awarded the Scott Medal By SuSan S. Lang Nina Bassuk, Cornell professor of horticulture, will be awarded the prestigious Scott Medal at the March 2008 annual meeting of the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College. The award is given to an individual who has made a national contribution to the science and the art of gardening. As specified with the original gift fund, the purpose of the award is “to promote a greater love of nature; make the nation more conscious of the beauty of the outdoors; develop a greater knowledge and love of plants and flowers; spread the gospel of better planting and designing; and arouse a wider interest in better planting and more beautiful gardens among all citizens.” Bassuk is the program leader of the Urban Horticulture Institute at Cornell. She works to improve the quality of urban life by enhancing the functions of plants within the urban ecosystem, taking into account stress physiology, horticultural science, plant ecology and soil science. the checkerspot butterfly caterpillar, Melitaea cinxia. pathogen affects the population dynamics of the wasps through its effect on the sex ratio of the baby wasps rather than the number of baby wasps.” The study, recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, focused on the fungus (Podosphaera plantaginis), the plant (Plantago lanceolata), the checkerspot caterpillar (Melitaea cinxia) and the parasitoid wasp (Cotesia melitaearum) that share habitat in Åland, Finland. The story is complicated partly because the female parasite wasp can determine the sex of the eggs she deposits in the caterpillar. And, in general, said van Nouhuys, the wasp chooses to lay female eggs in the healthiest caterpillars. But in this case, van Nouhuys suspects that the skewed sex ratios of the wasp larvae may not be due to the mother choosing to lay more female eggs, but because males and females compete for food inside the host caterpillar. And then the males lose, perhaps because they are smaller. The fungus is not lethal to the plant but changes the chemistry of infected leaves. Although caterpillars that eat these leaves end up the same size as their non-funguseating counterparts, their development rate is slower. The research was funded by the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence Program. sAskYA VAN NoUhUYs/pRoViDED Cornell Chronicle January 25, 2008 Campus researchers discover a novel player in how plants protect themselves three Arabidopsis lines used in the study. By KriShna ramanujan pRoViDED Researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) for Plant Research on Cornell’s campus have identified a crucial player in the defense network that allows plants to respond to pathogens. The findings, published last week in the journal Cell Host and Microbe, open a door for plant breeders to develop plants with better resistance to pathogens. Under normal circumstances, plants have a large number of resistance proteins, also known as R proteins, to respond to an attack by a pathogen. These proteins initiate such defense responses as releasing defense-signaling hormones and killing off cells surrounding an infection, which then keeps a pathogen from spreading. However, the researchers identified mutant Arabidopsis plants that did not trigger a normal cell death response to attack by pathogens. A close look at one of these plants revealed a mutation in a gene for an ATPase, an enzyme that is known to harness energy produced in cells to drive other chemical reactions. The researchers then discovered that this ATPase, called CRT1, interacts with and may mediate defense responses initiated by three different R proteins. “Because very few proteins that physically interact with resistance proteins have been identified to date, the identification and characterization of CRT1 should provide new insights in plant disease resistance and opportunities to enhance this resistance,” said Hong-Gu Kang, a research associate at BTI and the paper’s lead author. Dan Klessig, a scientist at BTI and adjunct professor in Cornell’s Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, is the paper’s senior author. The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation. Neutron stars can be more massive, while black holes are more rare, Arecibo Observatory finds Neutron stars and black holes aren’t all they’ve been thought to be. In fact, neutron stars can be considerably more massive than previously believed, and it is more difficult to form black holes, according to new research developed by using the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Paulo Freire, an astronomer from the observatory, presented his research at the American Astronomical Society national meeting in Austin, Texas, Jan. 11. In the cosmic continuum of dead, remnant stars, the Arecibo astronomers have increased the mass limit for when neutron stars turn into black holes. “The matter at the center of a neutron star is highly incompressible. Our new measurements of the mass of neutron stars will help nuclear physicists understand the properties of superdense matter,” said Freire. “It also means that to form a black hole, more mass is needed than previously thought. Thus, in our universe, black holes might be more rare and neutron stars slightly more abundant.” When the cores of massive stars run out of nuclear fuel, their enormous gravitation causes them to collapse. The core, typically with a mass 1.4 times larger than that of the sun, is compressed into a neutron star. These extreme objects have a radius about 10 to 16 kilometers and a density on the order of a billion tons per cubic centimeter. Astronomers had thought the neutron stars needed a maximum mass between 1.6 and 2.5 the mass of our sun in order to collapse and become black holes. However, this new research shows that neutron stars remain neutron stars between the mass of 1.9 and up to possibly 2.7 suns. “The matter at the center of the neutron stars is the densest in the universe. It is one to two orders of magnitude denser than matter in the atomic nucleus. It is so dense we don’t know what it is made out of,” said Freire. “For that reason, we have at present no idea of how large or how massive neutron stars can be.” From June 2001 to March 2007, Freire used Arecibo’s “L-wide” receiver (sensitive to radio frequencies from 1100 to 1700 MHz) and the Wide-Band Arecibo Pulsar Processors – a very fast spectrometer on the Arecibo telescope – to examine a binary pulsar called M5 B, in the globular cluster M5, which is located in the constellation Serpens. Like a lighthouse emits light, a pulsar is a strongly magnetized neutron star that emits large amounts of electromagnetic radiation, usually from its magnetic pole. As in the case of a lighthouse, distant observers perceive a sequence of pulsations, which are caused by the rotation of the pulsar. In the case of M5 B, these radio pulsations arrive at the Earth every 7.95 milliseconds. These radio pulsations were scanned by the wide-band spectrometers once every 64 microseconds for 256 spectral channels and then recorded to a computer disk with accurate timing information. The precise arrival times of the pulses were then used by the astronomers to accurately measure the orbital motion of M5 B about its companion. This allowed the astronomers to estimate the mass (1.9 solar masses) of the pulsar. Astronomers also working on this research are: Maureen van den Berg, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.; Jason W.T. Hessels, Astronomical Institute “Anton Pannekoek” of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands; and Alex Wolszczan, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pa. The Arecibo Observatory is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, a national research center operated by Cornell for the National Science Foundation.
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