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And Now, Biofeedback for Golfers
May/June 2005
by Marc Wortman
Robert Grober was a standout varsity golfer at Vanderbilt University. But at Vanderbilt he also learned enough math and physics to calculate the likelihoodthat he could ever make a living with his golf clubs. “So I became a physicist,” he says.
But Grober, now a professor of applied physics and physics at Yale, says he is still “obsessed” with the sport. Ten years ago, in a tough lie, he snapped the shaft of his club when he accidentally whacked a tree during follow-through on a swing. (He swears he didn’t break the club over his knee.) Grober looked at the hollow shaft, and it occurred to him that something useful might fit inside.
A decade later, taking a practice swing in his Becton Center lab, he says that one key to successful golf is “reproducible tempo”: generating identical mechanics and speed on every swing. Very few golfers ever achieve that. By contrast, “a touring professional is a walking, talking, breathing metronome.” How to become one? By turning a club into a metronome that players can listen to and learn from.
Three years ago, Grober made a conceptual leap in figuring out how to convert the tempo of a club’s swing into an audio soundscape by translating the speed of a swing into varying tones—low pitch for slow, higher for faster. The prototype for what he calls Sonic Golf, which took him the next three years to perfect, provides real-time audio biofeedback that reproduces the “sound” of a swing’s tempo.
Composed of sensors, a microprocessor, and a transmitter that broadcasts to a base station with a sound card, Sonic Golf can be inserted into the shaft of any club. Each swing then “plays” like an electronic organ—or a Jedi knight’s light saber. Swing hard through the ball like Tiger Woods and the tones range and stay high up the scale; stutter through a swing like a duffer and mournful notes resonate. A golfer or teacher can use Sonic Golf to break down and “listen” to the components of a swing, or look at graphical representations of the swing’s forces and speed at crucial moments.
Even certified hackers seem to benefit. Bill Greenleaf, a PGA master professional and director of instruction at the Dunes at Maui Lani, tested Sonic Golf on some of his students. “All the students made improvements in their swings in just 20 to 30 minutes,” he says. “Some fine-tuned, and some made dramatic changes that I would not previously have thought possible.”
Two decades after Grober gave up any hope of becoming a golf professional, he thinks his chances of making money off the game are looking up. Yale patented Sonic Golf and licensed it to a company Grober launched to manufacture and market the device.
Whether he succeeds or not, he thinks his swing has improved. “I’d be lying,” he admits, “if I said this wasn’t about making me a better golfer.”
Puzzle in a Microbe
by Elizabeth Svoboda ’03
Two years ago, German biologist Karl Stetter dove into a hydrothermal vent off the coast of Iceland and emerged with specimens of a strange new organism. Smaller than a red blood cell, Nanoarchaeum equitans was intriguing not only because it failed to fit into any of the five existing biological kingdoms, but also because it embodied a never-before-seen genetic conundrum. Although N. equitans’s proteins contained the common amino acids glutamate, tryptophan, histidine, and methionine, its genome lacked the transfer RNA (tRNA) genes ordinarily required to manufacture these amino acids.
Yale molecular biology professor Dieter Soll and graduate student Lennart Randau have now solved the mystery of the missing genes. Like words in an encrypted message, the genes were there all along: functional versions of the necessary tRNA genes are formed when certain segments of the organism’s DNA latch together. Scientists just needed to locate the scattered segments and put them in the right order. Soll and Randau accomplished this feat with software that compared N. equitans’s DNA genome sequences with those of 4,000 known tRNA genes. The findings were published in the February 3 issue of the journal Nature.
Though Soll doesn’t know exactly what caused N. equitans’s split-gene adaptation, he speculates the organism may have developed it in response to the harsh, hot environment inside undersea vents. “It may be that at high temperatures, protein synthesis is not very accurate,” he says. “Because of this, it may be safer to make the two half-links and then join them together.”
Whatever the reason for the vent-dwellers' unique genetic properties, they may provide clues about our own origins. The regions of N. equitans’s DNA that bind together to form tRNA resemble non-functional sequences found in the tRNA genes of more complex organisms—such as humans. Soll thinks these so-called “intron” sequences might be vestiges of the ancient protein-manufacturing process seen in N. equitans. “Our imagination should not be limited by how small or how old an organism is,” he says. “Genetic mechanisms we see operating today could have originated in the ancient world.”
Sight Lines and Genetic Lines
by Marc Wortman
About 15 million Americans have age-related macular degeneration (AMD), an incurable disease that destroys vision by attacking the focal point of the retina. For years, the genes responsible for AMD—the leading cause of blindness in Americans 55 and older—have eluded scientists. Now, Josephine Hoh, an assistant professor of epidemiology and public health, has discovered a gene for AMD. In the process, she established a new and potentially better way of searching for other disease-causing genes.
As part of the normal aging process, yellowish waste deposits called drusen accumulate around the retina’s focal point (called the macula). But in individuals with AMD, the drusen kills the cells that nourish neighboring photoreceptor cells. As these photoreceptors die, the central vision necessary for driving, reading, facial recognition, and other daily activities gradually disappears.
When Hoh came to Yale a year ago, she decided to look for a gene that lies behind the destructive drusen—and to try out a new tactic for the search.
Scientists typically spend years and work with thousands of patients in their attempts to identify genes that influence a specific disease. But in her study, Hoh compared the genes in the maculae of only 96 AMD patients and 50 otherwise precisely matched healthy subjects. Using large-scale computational methods that homed in on minute genetic variants between the two study groups, Hoh’s research team completed its work in only three months.
The results, published as the cover story of the April 15 issue of Science, identified a single variant gene for a substance known as complement factor H (CFH). “The message is quite clear,” says Hoh. “By controlling the study as tightly as possible you can greatly reduce the sample size, cost, and time.”
Hoh is continuing to analyze the data to identify additional genetic differences that determine who gets a particularly destructive form of AMD. She is also planning to apply her techniques to other diseases, including cancer.
1 + 1 = Evolution
by Bruce Fellman
Lemurs, a Yale psychologist has discovered, can do basic arithmetic. “We were surprised to find that they understand about as much as a six-month-old human infant,” says Laurie Santos.
In 1992, Karen Wynn, then at the University of Arizona and presently at Yale, startled the scientific world when she showed that human babies are apparently born hardwired with certain fundamental mathematical skills. Other scientists have since demonstrated that many of the so-called higher primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, share those skills.
Now Santos, a psychology professor specializing in primate cognition, has found that arithmetic ability evolved in the ancestors of modern primates at least 30 million years ago—when the ancestral line leading to present-day lemurs separated from the line leading to Homo sapiens.
For her study of human infants, Wynn used the “expectancy violation paradigm”: when babies were surprised by something, they should look at it longer than they would look at something that met their expectations. Laurie Santos and her assistants Jennifer Barnes '06 and Neha Mahajan '06 used the same research strategy for their lemur study, which was published in the March online edition of Animal Cognition.
In the wild, lemurs are found only on the African island-nation of Madagascar; the Santos team worked with four lemur species at a recently developed preserve for the animals in Myakka, Florida. Their work at the preserve was encouraged as part of the lemurs' “environmental enrichment.” It was not the easiest of investigatons, Santos admits. “These animals have very short attention spans,” she says.
Each trial lasted no longer than 10 seconds. As a lemur watched, a researcher would put two lemons into a box behind an opaque screen. When the screen was lifted, there were sometimes two lemons, sometimes only one. “This is basically a magic trick,” says Santos. (Her colleagues call her “the lemur illusionist.”) In every case, no matter what the species, “the animals looked reliably longer—it was on the order of one to one-and-a-half seconds—at the 'magical' outcome.”
When Santos varied the illusion by showing the lemurs three lemons or one big one, the pattern held. “They expected that one plus one equals two,” she says. “So these abilities that we often attribute to ourselves alone—like math—might have some pretty important rudiments as far back evolutionarily as we can test.”  |
