During Spring Break, a couple hundred scientists flocked to UH for the third Geologic Problem Solving with Microfossils conference to discuss the various uses of fossils.

Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, the director of UH’s Professional Geoscience Program, welcomed everyone to the four-day event, introducing himself and the program.

“We had over 200 speakers and presenters with people from at least 23 different countries attend. Also we had people from all of the major museums around the world attend as well, such as people from the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. and people from the Natural History Museum in London attended,” Nieuwenhuise said.

The various presentations tackled topics such as how fossils affect global warming and how they can be used to date rocks and discover oil and gas.

Originally from South Carolina, Nieuwenhuise has devoted himself to geosciences and teaching. With more than 23 years of geology, management and research expertise at oil companies such as Amoco Corporation and Mobil, currently ExxonMobil, he decided he wanted to get back into teaching.

“My whole life I’ve liked science. I liked chemistry, physics, biology, but I really, really liked biology,” Nieuwenhuise said.

At first, he was inspired as a young child by Jacques Cousteau, a famous oceanographer, to be an oceanographer as well but soon had a change of heart, Nieuwenhuise said.

While working as a geologist in New Orleans. He effectively drilled more than 15 production, exploration and relief wells. He also worked with the U.S. Geological Survey at the Smithsonian Institution.

Nieuwenhuise has also been funded and has worked on several research projects. He has also authored and co-authored many selected publications.

With Nieuwenhuise’s hands in a little bit of everything, he rarely has any down time to do much else, he said.

“I don’t have a lot of spare time. Actually, my last vacation was in July of 2011, and I need to go again. But every now and then, I get a weekend off. I enjoy movies, and I definitely enjoy art. Actually, when I used to work for Amaco, my wife would make me take four-day weekends every now and then, and it was good. We would drag our kids to the different art museums, and it was wonderful,” Nieuwenhuise said.

Over the course of his professional career, Nieuwenhuise has dedicated his life to geosciences and his teachings in it. Though he may not find himself with much down time in between, he said he truly enjoys what he does for the University.

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Frontier Fiesta’s annual cook-off returns. Participants will compete in six categories of pinto beans, beef brisket, chicken, chili, fajitas and pork ribs.

The Frontier Fiesta Cook-Off is giving trophies and cash prizes to the first, second and third place winners of the barbeque cooking competition. The competition will take place from Thursday to Saturday, and the winner will be announced at 6 p.m. Saturday.

Alumni director of the cook-off Bethany Johns said the cook-off portion of Frontier Fiesta had a small start.

“The cook-off started in 1991 and had 27 teams that first year,” she said.

The cook-off, featuring more than 50 cooking teams, begins Thursday, and the winner is announced Saturday. | uh.edu

Hunter Lewis, student director of the cook-off and communications sophomore, is excited about community participation in this year’s contest.

“This year we have a little over 50 teams participating in the cook-off. They range from alumni groups, representatives of colleges at UH and just people who enjoy having fun and cooking barbeque,” he said.

Without directly participating, Johns says there are still ways students can get involved with the cook-off.

“We always need students to help with the baking portion of the cook-off, Bake Fiesta. Students can be judges or just assist with the preparations for the judging,” she said.

Lewis also had a suggestion for students who want to get involved with the cook-off.

“The best way happens after they graduate, to come back and have a team of their own,” he said.

As an alumna, Johns’ favorite part of the Frontier Fiesta Cook-Off is the socializing.

“Frontier Fiesta is like a family reunion to me. One of my best friends, who now lives in New York, even flies down every year for the magical three days,” she said.

Lewis said his favorite parts of the cook-off are its history and the dedication of the veteran teams.

“I love the sense of tradition that I feel being involved with the cook-off. … Some of the teams who participate have been around for a very long time. This promotes a great atmosphere,” he said.

Johns said participating in Frontier Fiesta is a required part of being a Cougar.

“Frontier Fiesta is an invaluable tradition at UH. … Every student at UH owes it to themselves to come and see what the fuss is about and get a taste of our tradition and Cougar spirit,” she said.

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The molecular pathways involved in memory formation are beginning to unravel with a new key system discovered by Baylor College of Medicine in collaboration with UH.

A protein complex involved in a key cytoskeletal formation pathway, mTORC2, appears to have a prominent role in memory formation in both mice and fruit flies. BCM assistant professor of neuroscience Mauro Costa-Mattioli and BCM graduate student and first author in the study Wei Huang conducted this pathway analysis in mice while UH associate professor Gregg Roman did his research with flies.

“Mice, by themselves, are a single model and they give us a good glimpse but maybe not a complete glimpse of how memories form. It’s becoming more and more common that labs collaborate and look at different model systems, because each model system — in my case we study fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, in his case, mice — they each have their own benefit,” Roman said.

“By combining different model systems to see if we come up with the same answer, that gives us a great deal of confidence with that answer. One of things it tells us is that if it is the same in fruit flies as in mice that it’s been conserved over a very very long period of time.”

The key point, Roman said, is not only the discovery itself but its appearance in two distant relatives, implying that mTORC2 may have significant role in memory consolidation.

“It’s probably something very important. If it’s been conserved, if the same molecule in the same molecular systems have been used in fruit flies to consolidate memory as in mice to consolidate memory, it’s very likely that a lot of the species in between are using the same thing. And that also indicates that it is probably a very central feature of memory consolidation in the pathway that we uncovered,” Roman said.

To observe memory consolidation in fruit flies, Roman’s lab used negative feedback conditioning, associating a scent with an electric shock. They then placed the flies between two tubes, one containing the pain-related scent and another containing one unrelated to pain, allowing the flies to gravitate to either side, Roman said.

The flies without a functioning pathway did not have as much of a preference for either side as the ones that did contain the cytoskeletal-forming pathway. What Costa-Mattioli’s team did next was expose its mice to a drug that would supplement the missing components of the knocked down pathway.

“In mice, what Mauro was able to do is he was able to show that if you gave a drug that bypassed the defect in mTORC2, that those mice were now able to learn,” Roman said. “We are looking to see if we can have these ‘cognitive enhancer drugs.’”

“If you identify molecular pathways that are required for the formation of long-term memory, you can then potentially target these to help enhance the formation of memories.”

Looking toward the future, Roman said that with more time and research, these memory enhancers might be available to help relieve some of the symptoms of aging, such as memory decay.

“There are reasons why young people might want to increase their memory, but also it’s a very serious problem for the aging population where you have age-related memory decay and decline,” he said.

“What we can do, as we understand and develop more of these cognitive enhances, we can perhaps develop cocktails that can help in situations where memory declines to help give them boosts and maintain a higher level of cognitive performance later and later in life.”

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Students for a Democratic Society will kick off its fourth annual Israeli Apartheid Week starting Monday with a series of events throughout the week in hopes of educating students of the Palestine-Israeli conflict.

Israeli Apartheid Week is an annual international set of events from lectures, film screenings, cultural performances and mock set up of checkpoints that is held in cities and campuses across the globe that hopes to raise awareness about Israel’s apartheid policies toward Palestinians.

“We hope to combat Zionist propaganda and help our peers realize the realities of this inherently unjust oppression toward the Palestinian people through cultural programs and informative teach-ins,” said Fatima Syed, president of SDS.

In the West Bank, there is a separation barrier, also commonly referred to as apartheid wall, built that is 430 miles long and 26 feet tall. According to the September 2011 Fact Sheet, there are currently 522 roadblocks also known as checkpoints in the West Bank restricting movement for Palestinians.

“Students of all ethnic backgrounds should attend IAW not only to experience the life of a Palestinian in this day and age, but to gain knowledge about the $8 million a day that we Americans alone fund Israel. Our tax dollars should be spent here in our country and not to fund an illegal occupation,” said psychology junior Ola El-Mubasher.

SDS has built a mock separation barrier that will be set up Monday and Wednesday afternoon in Butler Plaza along with a mock checkpoint that students will go through in order to get a feel of what a checkpoint really is. At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, there will be a discussion with professors and peers about our country’s pivotal role in this issue.

Along with a mock checkpoint, SDS will be screening “Roadmap to Apartheid” at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the Oberholtzer Ballroom.

Hungry for Justice Fast-a-thon will conclude the week with many students taking part in a 24 hour fast — they will not eat food for 24 hours but will drink water — to discuss political prisoners with the guest speaker Alison Weir, human rights activist and executive director of ifamericansknew.org.

“The prisoners in Palestine have broken every hunger strike record. The reason it’s important to maintain interest and keep their story in the media is because it’s clear Israel is not ready to negotiate their release. These prisoners have no charges against them; they have been detained entirely for political issues because of who they are; that doesn’t work today. We need to keep Israel accountable to international law, norms and common human decency,” said Dana El-Kurd, UH alumna who is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Out of 70 applicants for the American Society for Training and Development scholarship, seven were chosen, one of which is a recent College of Technology duel-Master’s alumna.

The scholarship will provide Reena Sonigrah with an expensive membership, which will provide her a year’s access to an extensive research database. Her research, which involves improving the efficiency of learning, will help her be efficient in her own project, she said.

“I wrote about how I wanted to create an online infrastructure where people can have complete access with the click of a button. It’s a tough infrastructure to build. It involves a lot of thinking; it involves a lot of customization, data curation. So this is why I used ASTD and they kind of liked the idea. I was very excited when I got the email that, out of 70 students, six other students were chosen,” Sonigrah said.

“(Students) have so many things going on at the same time. How do you maximize your resources?”

Sonigrah graduated in December, and she said her time as a student was extremely busy. Over the course of her three years, Sonigrah earned two Master’s degrees — one in technology project management and another in human resource development — and had a son.

Additionally, she volunteered for on-campus organizations and with a group of undergraduate female students.

Sonigrah said it is essential that students figure out what they enjoy and how to do it before they invest time and energy into a degree.

“I spoke with these girls and they told me that they didn’t like what they were studying and that they were hoping to shift. It’s really hard. They might actually lose a year or two years. I thought, ‘Oh, then my study will be valuable to everybody,’” Sonigrah said.

Figuring out how to analyze something as subjective as how people learn is not simple, she said. For that, Sonigrah said she used surveys to help students understand how they learn. Now, she said she hopes to create a computer game that will provide a similar function.

“(The survey) doesn’t necessarily tell you what will work for you. We can write awesome algorithms to say if you do a set of things this will be the output, but the intuition that really comes by a lot of practice a lot of analysis and introspective, I want to be able to provide that,” Sonigrah said.

“I think creating digital games is the best way for people to learn who they are. It’s fun. In the end, he or she will think, ‘I’m just playing a game,’ but they get very valuable feedback and will realize their learning style. It will help them to reflect on what they like or don’t like and how they can channel their energy.”

Sonigrah is doing research with a UH professor to help companies search for and train employees for a technology called Smart Grid, an automated data collector, which is making headway in some businesses.

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UH is standing strong against guns, but a bill in the Texas Senate may make that stance void.

In the Student Government Association, senators reaffirmed their opposition to allowing weapons on campus by passing a resolution with a vote of 16 to 3. However, in January, a bill was filed in the Texas Senate that would allow licensed owners to bring concealed handguns on university campuses. If passed, universities would not be allowed to prohibit carrying on campus.

“The intention of the bill before the Texas Senate is one thing, but the impact would be quite another. We could expect more small disputes to be resolved with guns rather than words or fists, as we saw in the recent Lone Star College shooting,” said Carol Ann Ross, a graduate student in the Graduate College of Social Work and the author of the bill.

“With our vote, the UH SGA has joined a number of other SGAs in Texas who have expressed similar opposition to allowing concealed weapons on their campuses. Student body President (Cedric) Bandoh was a sponsor of the resolution, so he will sign it and shepherd it through university channels on its way to the Texas state legislature.”

UH police chief Ceaser Moore spoke before voting took place at the senate meeting, offering any additional insight he could before SGA made their final decision.

“If you allow more handguns on campus you’re going to have situations where people mistake someone pulling out their handgun or situations where guns are lost, situations where people are involved in conflicts and those guns will escalate those conflicts,” Moore said.

Just before leaving for Spring Break, UH students and faculty faced a gun scare when a student mistook a barcode scanner for a weapon. Text alerts were sent out and people were advised to avoid the area until the situation had cleared.

“I think the underlying fear that universities are so unsafe that students must carry weapons for protection does not match the facts,” Ross said.

“Some students do feel unsafe on campus, particularly at night, but the reality is that crime is actually lower on the UH campus than in most of our own neighborhoods. The disconnect between perceived and actual risk of crime is really at the heart of the concealed weapons issue.”

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The Partnership for the Advancement and Immersion of Refugees, a UH organization, has won Houston Rockets star Jeremy Lin’s Making a Difference Project.

UH organization, PAIR, which tutors and mentors students at schools across Houston, took the children to a basketball game this semester. | Courtesy of Valerie Hang

PAIR competed against two other organizations to win publicity from Lin as well as funding for its program.

UH PAIR president and education junior Valerie Hang said the organization has big plans.

“PAIR is utilizing the funding to support its summer program for refugee youth from three different neighborhoods of Houston. The funds will support supplies, summer counselors, stipends for refugee youth, leadership development and more,” she said.

Gemrick Curtom, public relations junior and UH PAIR publicity officer, said UH PAIR used networking and social media to win the competition.

“We worked closely with the Rice PAIR chapter to campaign. Plenty of flyers were passed out weeks in advance of the deadline and also during our bake sale in CEO’s Carnaval of Cultures. We made a Facebook event with instructions on how to cast a vote and invited over 19,000 people,” Curtom said.

Hang said PAIR received a lot of help from family and friends.

“We had to work very hard to get out the word about the contest, and we were overwhelmed with the friends and friends of friends that rallied for us throughout the contest and up until the very end. Literally 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, March 7,” she said.

Curtom said the contest got very close.

“I think we all knew we had a good chance at winning, but at one point PAIR was down by 1,000 votes overnight,” he said.

Hang said she was happy with the final results of the contest.

“It was an amazing feeling to see that we actually won, and it made us realize what a strong, dedicated, energetic team we have. We are incredibly grateful for every single individual who has made this organization what it is today,” she said.

Curtom said winning Lin’s Make a Difference Program can help PAIR grow.

“Hopefully, PAIR will expand its program and be able to serve more refugees here in Houston. With this additional support, PAIR will be able to do more as a non-profit,” he said.

Hang agreed.

“With the exposure that Jeremy Lin will bring to PAIR, we hope to bring more awareness to refugees and the great potential of refugee youth throughout our city,” she said.

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UH’s Police Department had several cases of pre-Spring Break crime last week, one of which resulted in the arrest of a student in Cougar Village.

The student, who will receive a Student Life referral, was arrested Friday for possession of marijuana and was transported to the Harris County Jail.

Since March 5, there have been four reported thefts at the Campus Recreation and Wellness Center.

Two backpacks, a laptop and other personal property were reportedly stolen. One unattended and unsecured backpack was reported stolen on Tuesday, the other on Wednesday.

A visitor reported Wednesday that a pair of unknown individuals had stolen his unattended and unsecured laptop, and another student reported that his property was stolen out of his possibly-unsecured locker Thursday.

Also on Thursday, a man unaffiliated with the University was identified at Cullen Oaks and was arrested on suspicion of two robberies.

Two reported burglaries also occurred on Thursday.

In one case, a student reported that his unattended but secured vehicle was burglarized near the South Park Annex, and in the other, a student submitted an online report that his room at the Quadrangle was broken into and various items were stolen.

For more up-to-date information, UHPD posts the daily crime bulletin at uh.edu/police.

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At 7:57 p.m. Sunday at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management, guests and staff members evacuated the hotel because of smoke and a power outage.

The cause of the incident was a hydraulic pump malfunction in one of the hotel’s elevators. No one was injured.

The evacuees walked across the street to the University Center until the power was restored at 9:27 p.m.

“We have to look out for the safety of everyone at the College — especially the students,” said Fernando Cuellar, general manager for the hotel.

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The students who participate in two days or more of service will receive tickets, including carnival access and lunch, to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo on March 15. Interested students should hurry though; there are only 12 spots available on each day of service. | Wikimedia Commons

UH students will skip the beach to volunteer with four different organizations over Spring Break.

The Center for Student Involvement has organized a community action break to run from Monday to Friday, with 12 spots available to sign up for each day.

During this week, volunteers will be sorting and inspecting food donations at the Houston Food Bank, assembling breakfast bags at Interfaith Ministries’ Meals on Wheels location, working on garden projects with Urban Harvest at Harry Holmes Healthy Harvest garden in Sunnyside and organizing the Search Homeless Services building.

Stephanie Schmidt, associate director at the Center for Student Involvement, says the community action break was inspired by last year’s UH Alternative Spring Break program in which students spent the week tutoring low-income children in Louisiana.

Schmidt said she hopes to expand UH’s program over the next several years to include local opportunities as well as those in other areas.

According to alternativebreaks.org, the origin of alternative breaks goes back to a group of college students in the early 1980s who sought to counter traditional Spring Break trips. After the development, the number of college students opting to volunteer over their break has been consistently increasing over the last two decades.

The good deeds of these students are not to go unnoticed. Those who volunteer for at least two of the days will be rewarded with free admission to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo on March 15, including a free lunch and carnival tickets.

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