Dr. Nevada Windrow spent her childhood along the Delaware River in the boating community of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Always in or around water, the now pediatric neuropsychologist and PADI master scuba diver knew how to swim before she entered primary school.

Still, every time she visited the pool in her family’s apartment complex, she was asked to prove it. “It did not matter that I had been living there for several years and the lifeguards knew me,” says Winrow, who noticed that white children were never asked to perform a swim test.

In 2017, she and her daughter Taylor created The Black Girls Dive Foundation to promote water safety and address cultural narratives surrounding swimming activities. The Owings Mills-based organization, made possible through funding by the Society for Science and the Public and The Pollution Project, aims to broaden the participation of minorities in aquatic-based sciences by encouraging girls ages 9 to 17 to develop their STEAM identities. “Learning has to be authentic,” Winrow says, adding that the program’s goal is to offer transformative experiences that make learning sciences fun.

Through STREAMS, the foundation’s hallmark program, which stands for Science, Technology, Robotics, Engineering, Art, Mathematics, and Scuba and Scientific Diving, lessons in leadership and marine conservation are integrated with basic scuba diving techniques.

Saturday meetings at the Liberty Road Recreation Center teach the girls everything from the basics of underwater photography to how to assemble their own remote-operated vehicles. However, many of the program’s learning experiences take place across the nation, like at the Georgia Aquarium, where during a slumber party last year, the girls swam with gentle giants in the waters of the Ocean Voyager Exhibit.

Each year, the program takes participants on a capstone project abroad, giving them the chance to showcase their leadership skills while learning about other cultures. Last November, 10 participants traveled to Egypt to sail the Nile River, explore the terrain of Sharm El Sheikh, and discover marine life in the Red Sea, where they dove in the Straits of Tiran and Ras Muhamad.

Winrow looks forward to expanding Black Girls Dive with Taylor, an associate scientist at Pfizer, to include foundation chapters on the West Coast and on Fiji, Samoa, and the Cook Islands. “My whole thing is about exposing them and giving them awareness of the careers that are out there and the academic pathway to achieving them,” Winrow says.

Columbia resident Pier Blake, whose 12-year-old daughter Sanaa Lee joined the foundation this year, is looking forward to receiving his own scuba certification. “She doesn’t get to have all this fun without me!” Blake says.

In many ways, Terry Virts is just your average native Marylander. He loves the Orioles and fondly recalls growing up in Columbia during the 1970s and ’80s. How is he not like the average Marylander? Well, as a retired astronaut and one-time commander of the International Space Station, he has spent 213 days in space, which he documented extensively in thousands upon thousands of hi-def videos and still photos. Since retiring from NASA in August 2016, he has spent his time organizing his images and career recollections into a book, the newly released View From Above: An Astronaut Photographs the World. While in town on his book tour last week, he stopped by Baltimore’s offices (where he geeked out about our Orioles-themed décor) and answered our questions about growing up in Columbia, working with the Russians, and thinking he might die in space.

*This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

The book just came out last week and is the result of your 16-year career with NASA, including your stint on the International Space Station, during which you took the most photos anyone has ever taken from space. That’s what they told me, yeah. When I landed, they were like, ‘Ugh. Finally, you’re back on Earth.’ Because they told me I took 319,000-plus pictures. 

Were they ever like, ‘Maybe hold off taking pictures for a day or two?’ Oh, totally. And it wasn’t just fun pictures. Like sometimes, if you’re doing an experiment, they want three different views. If you’re filming experiments, that payload stuff would kill all the downlink so there’s no time to get your fun stuff down. We had RED, this Hollywood-quality camera. Jim Cameron told me he used it to film Avatar. The RED camera was the worst. My last week I was like, ‘You know what, I took enough stills.’ So I got the RED out, and they had always warned us to be real judicious with it because it uses so many gigabytes. But I just filmed away, and they were like, ‘Oh my God!’ But you know what, a week later they had it all down, and they made the most popular UHD highlight reel. It was a couple years ago when UHD was new. It’s amazing. And they’ll have that forever. Yeah, it was like, ‘Sorry. You’ve got to download it.’

So tell us something about space that the average person doesn’t know. So it’s nothing like Star Wars. The Wookiees are not that loud in real space. The Storm Troopers are actually nice guys. [Laughs]

Well, tell us about floating. In space, you move with your hands and you carry things with your feet.

Why? Because you have to grab onto handrails to push yourself around. The way we’re designed: Hands are fine motion and feet are [mimes pounding his feet]. You can do that [mimes jumping], but you’re going to shoot up to the ceiling.

What are the annoying parts about being in space? Well, floating is super annoying. Like, anybody can move over there and get to the door, but to end up at the door [facing it with your hand near the handle], you have to push and rotate at the correct number of degrees per second and your brain has to figure out that it’s going to take five seconds to get there and I need to rotate 10 degrees.

How long does that learning curve take? The first couple of days, it is pretty steep. After a week, I was still not there. After two weeks, I was good but I wasn’t [at my peak]. It probably took me a month before I was good, and I got really good. 

What about sleeping in space? Yeah, you get sunrise and sunset every hour and a half, unless you’re in high beta [orbit]. I went through a week with no sunsets. 

It’s like living in Scandinavia in the summer or something? Right or Antarctica in the winter. It’s just constant sunlight. So you close the windows and you don’t know what the sun is doing and you set your alarm to GMT [Greenwich Mean Time]. 

Why GMT? Because it’s the International Space Station and the bus and the subway system [in Russia] does not run in the middle of the night. So we had to pick a time that was close to their normal work hours for their mission control people. Going GMT is close, it’s a couple hours difference. We didn’t just cave and use Moscow time. So it kind of saves face for us. [We can say] ‘Okay, GMT, that’s official.’ But the real reason is the Moscow subway schedule—so I’ve been told. I was still in the Air Force when the [ISS was launched]. 

Speaking of the Russians, you were up on the ISS with how many others? Five others. There were three Russians, two Americans, and an Italian.

This was in 2015, which, even then, was a tense time in U.S.-Russian relations. How did that affect your working relationships? It was great. It was the highlight of my mission having my Russian crewmates there. It was a lot of fun to hang out with them. We all knew that these things were happening on Earth and we would just consciously, actively say, ‘We’re going to ignore the politics and focus on staying alive.’ Because on the other side of the window is vacuum and death. In a universe of a lot of bad stuff happening, the space station was a good example of how people can work together. 

Can you give an example of something political that threatened to divide you? Well, [the U.S.] put sanctions on Russia. And when that happened, the ruble got devalued in half. So my cosmonaut friends were calling home asking their wives, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And I’m the guy that did it, and I’m commander, so that could have been very divisive. So I made a very active decision to spend time with them, have dinner with them, to talk. And actually, the cosmonauts are paid in dollars—that’s just the way their contract is—so in the long run, their salaries doubled.

And then [the U.S.] had an orbital rocket that blew up here in Virginia, a Russian Progress rocket blew up, and a Space X rocket blew up. Three rockets in eight months. When the Progress blew up, it was the Soyuz [Russian spacecraft] rocket after [the one that delivered me to the ISS], so they wanted to do an investigation before they launched the next crew to replace us. So we didn’t know how long we were going to be stuck in space. And we were very flexible. Every day I would say, ‘Okay, guys, tell us your rumors,’ because I didn’t want rumors. I was like, ‘Let’s get ’em out. What is everybody hearing?’ And the Russians had the best because it was their rocket. I would talk to the station program manager [at NASA] and he was great. He was just like, ‘Here’s what we know. The reality is, it’s their rocket and they’re going to decide.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I can deal with that.’ There have been other examples when crews got delayed—or they didn’t even get delayed; they had threats of delays—and they were like, ‘Arggghh!’ But we were very positive. And our international partners get paid by the day. When they get extended, they get paid even more. The folks were not that upset about having to stay longer. 

You were born in Baltimore, grew up in Columbia, graduated from Oakland Mills High School. What are your memories of growing up in Columbia? I lived in Lanham and Gambrills first. I didn’t move to Columbia until fourth grade. My fourth grade teacher just found me on Facebook. He remembered stuff. He was like, ‘There was this trip to D.C. and you bought a prism, and you spent 15 minutes explaining how a prism works.’ I remember that but it’s crazy that he remembers that.

So obviously you had an aptitude for science. Yeah, math and science were my strong suits. 

What was your experience going through Columbia’s public schools? It was amazing. The public school system then, that I went through, was rated one of the, I think, top 10 in the country. First of all, it was a multi-racial place. It was kind of weird because I didn’t really think about when I was growing up because I had friends of all [backgrounds]—a Korean guy, an Indian guy. We had everything, and it just wasn’t a big deal. And academically, it was amazing. I got to take Calc 3 in high school and had French every year, seventh through twelfth grade. I became a French minor. I became an astronaut because of my French experience. Madame Micka, I talk about her in my book. She was my French teacher in high school. 

What do you mean you became an astronaut because of your French experience? There are 100 test pilots who are great, but I was the guy who had done an exchange at the French air force academy, and I had international foreign language [experience]. For something like being an astronaut that’s so competitive, you want to have something that makes you stand out, and that made me stand out. No one ever tells you why they picked you, but I just know in my heart that it wasn’t only math and science, it was also the language side of things that got me in. 

You really did want to be a pilot from a young age. There’s a cute picture of you in the book standing on the wing of a plane. Where do you think this love of flying came from? The first book I ever read was about Apollo. It was one of those picture books for kids and I was in Lanham, and I can remember it. It just stuck. My mom was a secretary at Goddard [Flight Center in Greenbelt] and my dad and my stepdad both worked at Goddard. But they weren’t pilots. It was satellites, not human space flight. 

But you were around the culture. Yeah, they would bring home pictures. I remember when Viking landed on Mars I got pictures from Mars. They would get, probably, posters from books they could bring home. They would just bring stuff like that home and my room was just covered with airplanes and stuff. And every summer I’d get Astronomy magazine and, the day it showed up, I would sit there and read the whole thing. 

Do you think a human is going to go to Mars? I’m sure, eventually. I hope sooner rather than later, and I hope America leads it. If we don’t, other countries will. The thing about humanity is that nothing is static. Just ask the Portuguese, ask the Brits, or ask the Chinese. They decided to build a wall, and for 1,000 years they just wallowed in themselves and they didn’t grow. The whole world did this [mimes expanding] and China was behind the wall. So America had the 20th century, right? That was our century. But that doesn’t mean the 21st century is going to be our century unless we decide to make it so.

 What is the most dangerous situation you’ve ever encountered in spaceflight? There’s a whole chapter in the book about it called “Emergencies in Space.” There was an ammonia leak. We’re sitting there, minding our own business, and the alarm goes off, and we pop our heads out. Samantha, my Italian crewmate, we’re looking at the panel. I see ‘ATM.’ There are three kinds of emergencies: There’s fire. There’s an air leak. And there’s toxic atmosphere, which is ammonia inside the atmosphere. Ammonia is the coolant. So cars have radiator fluid, the station uses ammonia. That’s how it stays cool—on the American side. The Russian side uses sugar water. It’s not as efficient. It’s not as good a coolant, like ammonia, but it’s sugar water. Ammonia kills you dead.

So I go, ‘ATM?’ It was such a big deal that I just couldn’t process it. So we put on oxygen masks, run down to the Russian segment, and close the hatch because the Russian segment is safe. And then you’re supposed to take all of your clothes off because if there’s ammonia in your clothes, its poisonous, and then you go through another hatch. But we didn’t take our clothes off. No one smelled anything. We were like, ‘We’re probably fine.’ And the ground was kind of mad at us about that. Thirty minutes [later], the ground goes, ‘Hey, just kidding, it was a false alarm.’ So we’re just like, ‘Ugh.’ It just kills the day’s schedule. So we get back and we’re putting things away because we had just dropped everything and the CAPCOM [the Capsule Communicator] calls up and says, ‘Execute ammonia response now. This is a real thing. This isn’t a drill.’ It was this super intense voice. We were like, ‘Crap!’ We put the masks on, we go down, we close the hatch, we don’t take our clothes off. We do the whole thing. We get a sampler out. Okay, the air is good. Twenty or thirty minutes later we take our masks off and we’re like, ‘huh.’

What I knew had happened was the computer [activated] the alarm automatically. I knew there would be a crowd of engineers looking at every little bit of data. What I assumed had happened was, after the first alarm, they went, ‘Nah, that’s not really a leak. Tell them it’s not.’ And then they [continued] to watch the data and it [looked] like it was still leaking and they said, ‘Yeah, that’s a leak. It’s a small one, but it’s a real leak.’ And then they called us back. Since I’ve worked in mission control for years, I knew what was going on; they didn’t tell us this. And then we sat around for hours on the Russian side and the Russian deputy prime minister called up in the middle of sanctions and all these bad things and says, ‘Hey Americans, you can stay as long as you want. We’re going to work together.’ This was the same guy that had said we could take a trampoline to the space station after the U.S. had put sanctions on Russia. The same guy who was having a Twitter battle with, I guess, Obama at the time called up and said, ‘Hey we’re going to work together and get through this.’ So it was a great, great, great example international cooperation in space when things were really bad down here.

So we spent the day like, ‘So, there’s a small leak on the station.’ What’s going to happen if it continues to leak is the station pops. It just gets over-pressurized and the metal explodes—unless they vent it. They could vent it and then there’s no air and ammonia stuck to the walls. So we’re like, the station’s dead, and we’re going to stay on the Russian segment for a few weeks—with the one pair of underwear because all my clothes are over there—and then go back to Earth and the station will go into the Pacific. And then I went and took a nap. I was like, ‘I don’t have anything else to do. I’m going to take a nap.’ And then they called up and said, ‘Just kidding, it was a false alarm.’ [Laughs]

But then when we went back to the American segment they said, ‘But just keep your masks on just in case.’ So my crewmate and I, we put our masks on and we had these samplers and we were floating around and it was like this surreal alien movie. There were things floating around—we just abandoned stuff and left—so it was like being the first person on this ghost ship in space. And then everything was fine. That’s a story that no one knows and it’s an amazing story.

So, essentially, you got told it was a false alarm twice? Yes. And there have always been false fire alarms, and there have been a few false air leak alarms, but there’s never been a false ammonia alarm.

Ever? That’s the one and only ammonia alarm. The ammonia alarm is a big deal. That’s the one you don’t want to get. They sent a text to my family at four in the morning. The text is in the book. My wife got it and she gave it to me for the book. In general, space flight sucks for families. It’s just hard. Everyone’s always like, ‘Oh you’re so lucky your dad’s an astronaut!’ My kids are like, [rolls eyes]. We were watching the NBA five or six years ago and my daughter, she was probably like 10 at the time, and we were watching the Heat and they were in the finals and she just looks at me and says, ‘Dad, why can’t you be more like LeBron James?’   

Admittedly, some of the first things that come to mind when we hear ‘Girl Scouts’ are Thin Mints, Tagalongs, and Shortbreads. But Girl Scouts of the USA is aiming to change that with the addition of 23 new badges focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). 

 “Girls are able to learn about STEM in a safe place,” said STEM specialist for Girl Scouts of Central Maryland (GSCM) Stephanie Alphee. “We’re helping to break those stereotypes for girls who want to learn more about careers they can get into.”

STEM programming is nothing new to Girl Scouts, but it became a major initiative for GSCM when Northrop Grumman sponsored and funded the addition of a STEM lab at the Central Maryland location. Since then, all girls from the tiniest Daises to teen Ambassadors have been working on projects that concentrate on developing skills in science and technology like designing robotic arms, learning the chemical properties of slime, and creating solar ovens that can cook s’mores.

“We are trying to appeal to girls in the way that they learn the various fields by integrating art,” Alphee explained. “Girls like to be creative, so teaching STEM in a way that appeals to them is really important.” 

Many of the STEM badges were requested by scouts based on their interests and future goals. With badges like ‘roller coaster design’ and ‘think like a programmer,’ the girls are introduced to a world of robotics and engineering that help with everyday problem solving skills. Seven-year-old Brownie Cayla Hicks, who plans to be a scientist, says the addition of the STEM badges gives her an extra push.

“I’m trying to get the ‘designing robots’ badge,” Hicks said. “I like building things and discovering new things.”

Learning about STEM programming is just one layer of the new venture—the Girl Scouts have partnered with professionals in the field as another added benefit of the platform. 

“One of our big initiatives is to place STEM role models right in front of the girls, Alphee said. “We bring in women who are engineers or astronauts that bring that extra inspiration to them and really try to develop that interest at a young age. Having mentors and supporters to keep you on that pipeline is important.”

In conjunction with the new badges, GSCM also participates in an annual festival that combines STEM with art to open up even more career opportunities, like graphic design and architecture. During this festival, parents meet with professionals in the field and learn ways that the girls can nurture their interests at home.

The addition of the STEM badges is just the first step in Girl Scouts’ mission to more fully enrich young girls’ minds. Next year, the group will launch a new initiative that will allow the girls to earn “cyber security” badges expand opportunities for the girls to break into fields that are currently male-dominated.

“We are an interest building organization, we’re a skill development organization, and we’re an inspirational organization for girls,” Alphee said. “We really do focus on those pillars of building girls with courage, confidence, and character.”

The story of Henrietta Lacks has resonated with people around the world—through an award-winning book by author Rebecca Skloot and most recently, through a movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey that premieres this Sunday on HBO.

Now, that story will be immortalized further through a mural that Lacks’ granddaughter, Jeri Lacks Whye, and a Philadelphia-based art studio are working together to bring to life. They’ve also enlisted The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and see the process of creating the mural as a way to start conversations about the tensions between the storied medical institution and the surrounding community.   

“Jeri always says, ‘I just want people to know my grandma,’” says Lizzie Kripke, co-principal artist at Meg Saligman Studio. “Her grandmother is someone who’s a part of all of us now, in a literal way if we’ve had a polio vaccine.”

On January 29, 1951, Hopkins doctors took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks—wife of a Bethlehem Steel worker—who had an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Though she passed away eight months later, the tissue, used by researchers without her consent, went on to establish the cell line HeLa—the first immortal human cells ever grown in a culture, which have been invaluable to medicine ever since. 

“There’s a lot of beauty in the science and in her life and family, along with the darker side,” Kripke says. “If we can cast things in a positive light, and acknowledge what’s gone wrong but also celebrate what’s gone right, I think that’s a different way to present this.”

She and the Lacks family are still deciding the site for the mural, and Kripke expects that the bulk of the work will take place next year.

“We’ll feature Henrietta Lacks, but it’s not going to be just a picture that memorializes her,” she says. “It’s going to pull lots of elements from the area as well as her life and story.”

The process of designing the mural will include getting Henrietta Lacks’ family, community members, and Hopkins doctors and officials in the same room for discussion.

“We can’t overstate what the art will do, as this story touches on so many interconnected issues,” Kripke says. “But I do think art is effective in getting the ball rolling and shifting culture in one way or another.”

On a late September day, Stephen Godfrey squints in the morning sunlight as it dazzles across the Chesapeake Bay. The sun-bleached beach stretches north and south as far as the eye can see, and while the tide is considered low, it laps at Godfrey’s ankles and licks up toward the top of his black wellies.

Still, he pushes on—down the beach, through the waves, under fallen trees, steadily over slimy, slippery rocks—all beneath the majestic cliffs that tower over him like a divine being. Finally, he reaches his destination, squatting down to inspect the base of the cliff.

To understand the history of Calvert Cliffs, one must go back even further, long before the birth of the Chesapeake Bay. Some 200 million years ago, the East Coast was connected to the supercontinent Pangaea.

“When we crashed into Africa, the Piedmont and Appalachian Mountains were gigantic, alp-like peaks,” says Godfrey. “When the continents pulled apart, the mountains began to erode as we pulled further away. They eroded and eroded and made the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Some of that mountaintop was taken off to make where we stand today.”

Over the millennia that followed, the Susquehanna River carved away at this low-lying land, flooding and receding with the climate, its little trail eventually backfilling to create the wide and splendid Chesapeake and, in turn, through waves and wind, the Calvert Cliffs.

But as the rising waters continue to work their erosive magic on the cliffs’ facade, the loss is also a gain as new fossils fall out of the receding ridge. Be it by shell, bone, or tooth, more than 600 Miocene species have been identified, representing nearly every animal phylum. That includes some 400 species of mollusks, like the iconic Ecphora gardnerae gardnerae, a caramel-colored spiral snail shell that is now Maryland’s state fossil. Even the occasional ancient land mammal has been discovered in this Darwinian domain—mastodons, rhinoceroses, tapirs, horses, dogs—most likely washed offshore during a violent storm or sudden flood.

Spotting something in the sand, Godfrey picks up a black, twig-like object, lifting the specimen into the air and rolling it around in his fingers before tapping it to his front tooth. “Ah,” he says, identifying the specimen as the tooth-like dental plate of a Miocene stingray. He knows its age because of the dark color, dense heft, and glassy timbre of its tap—all qualities obtained over the passage of time. Another means of distinguishing an ancient fossil from an average objet trouvé is rather simple: knowing what species no longer reside here or even exist.

A few steps later, he spies a puzzle-like piece of ancient leatherback turtle shell, followed by the base of a prehistoric dolphin skull. Up ahead, a man is slowly wading through the waves, a gnarled walking stick in hand, his curly salt-and-pepper tufts of hair windswept from the breeze. He is Pat Gotsis, a noted collector and friend of the museum, and as the two men exchange greetings, Gotsis shows Godfrey his morning’s finds, pulling out a pocketful of pristine sharks’ teeth—megalodon, mako, sand tiger, snaggletooth—which abound if you have the eye.

Since he retired this past September, Gotsis has watched the tides and walked the cliffs almost every day. At 55, he knows the terrain like it was his own property, having grown up here, collecting fossils along the banks since he was 10 years old.

“It’s peaceful,” he says. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

Through the years, Gotsis has seen the cliffs evolve from his personal playground into a collectors’ paradise, and he has amassed a collection in the thousands along the way, including his most prized possession—the teeth of an extinct squalodon, or shark-toothed whale.

“As the years went by, it just got to be second nature,” says Gotsis. “I thought I would grow tired of it, but I haven’t yet.”

Godfrey and his two-man team at the Calvert Marine Museum rely on a large network of beachcombers like Gotsis who report and donate fossils. Most of the cliffs are now private property, but many of the best collectors have approval for perusal from generous property owners. They’ve helped Godfrey locate giant finds, like the virtually complete skeleton of an ancient baleen whale. Still, public access points exist in multiple locations, including the beloved 1,300-acre Calvert Cliffs State Park.

On any given day, from dawn to dusk, a handful, if not dozens of treasure seekers walk the strand, their gaze lowered and eyes focused on the miscellany in the sand. Some even sport shovels and sieves, but fossil collecting from beneath the cliffs is off limits, due to the danger of landslides.

“A lot of these collectors have a real eye for it,” says Godfrey. “They spend more time along the cliffs than I do.”

The museum’s collection continues to grow, but out here, admiring the miles and miles of untouched beauty, looking across the bay to a side he cannot see, Godfrey knows the Calvert Cliffs are not infinite.

The ebb and flow of the Earth’s climate also brings real concerns for property owners who reside along the cliffs. Every year, the water eats away at their shoreline—inches, sometimes feet—and edges toward their homes. Some residents are even rip-rapping their waterfronts to slow the rate of erosion, their rocky blockades forever cutting off accessibility for exploration and excavation.

“It’s a resource that is dwindling,” says Godfrey. “We see our access to certain sections of the cliffs as sort of doomed.”

For that, he knows he has to keep going—there is so much more to discover.

“There are still plenty of things we don’t understand about the universe,” says Godfrey. “We would be foolhearted to say we know all there is to know.”

Back in the basement of the Calvert Marine Museum, the small collections room is illuminated in fluorescent light, featuring aisles and aisles of filing cabinets filled with fossils, each drawer home to hundreds of razor-sharp sharks’ teeth or countless bits of blackened bone. At last count, the collection held more than 100,000 specimens.

Surrounded by boxes of yet-to-be-archived fossils, Godfrey gently holds an unknown object in his hands, brought in by a diver from a river in Virginia. It’s part of an ancient skull but features an unusual, spur-like knot he’s never seen before, and that’s a good feeling. Godfrey revels in being stumped.

“That’s when the creative juices start to flow,” he says. “Like, this is something different. This is something new.”

Buried Treasure

Explore Miocene fossils from the Calvert Marine Museum’s personal collection.

Kenneth Sembach was just a fifth-grader in suburban Chicago when a book report set the course of his life. He was perusing his school’s library, looking for a worthy title, when the bell rang. “I was out of time,” he recalls now, nearly 40 years later, a faint Midwestern lilt still detectable in his measured, thoughtful speech. “I picked up a book on the shelf—I had to have something—and it was a small field guide to the stars. . . . So I would go outside at night and see if I could find these things. This sparked my imagination, and I’ve been in love with it ever since.”

The “it,” of course, is astronomy. Or maybe the universe. Or maybe scientific discovery. Or maybe all three. In any case, Sembach is still staring up at the sky in wonder, asking questions—only now he’s in a position to answer them.

Sembach is the new director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)—a facility located on the Homewood campus of The Johns Hopkins University and operated by a consortium of astronomical research universities for NASA. In a beige office building off San Martin Drive, he now leads some of the world’s best minds—a Nobel Prize winner among them—in some of mankind’s most ambitious scientific endeavors.

The most famous of these undertakings is the Hubble Space Telescope for which STScI runs science operations. The data that Hubble has sent back and STScI scientists have analyzed has transfixed astronomers and the public at large, most dramatically via exquisite images of swirling nebulae, billowing dust clouds, and kaleidoscopic galaxies.

In October 2018, Hubble will get a companion in the skies—the James Webb Space Telescope, affectionately known as “the Webb.” Though as monumental a project as Hubble—which has, among other things, helped astronomers determine the current rate at which the universe is expanding—the Webb will differ in several key ways.

Unlike Hubble, which circles the Earth in a low orbit, Webb will be propelled a million miles into space and parked. Operating just a few degrees above absolute zero, it will be able to look back through time to detect the dying embers of some of the first stars and galaxies that formed not long after the Big Bang.

That is, if all goes according to plan. Because of its distance from the Earth, the observatory will not be serviceable like Hubble is—“so,” acknowledges Sembach, “it has got to work.”

The reason for the distance is because the Webb, unlike Hubble, is primarily an infrared observatory, meaning its instruments will distinguish wavelengths of light that are beyond the visible spectrum (aka ROYGBIV), but that can suggest temperature. If it were in orbit around the Earth, the heat from the planet and the sun would interfere with its readings. And we want those readings crystal clear. They will help answer some of mankind’s most enduring questions.

“At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”

On a dreary November day, just a little over two weeks into his tenure as STScI’s fifth director, Sembach sits perched on the edge of a couch in his unnervingly neat third-floor office. (“That’s ’cause I’ve just moved in. Give it time, give it time,” he cracks.) He has just come from giving a pep talk to some of STScI’s approximately 650 employees. With the telescope still in pieces around the country and staffers buried in minutiae prepping for its assembly and launch, he says he reminded them to take the long view.

“You come and you work on it every day, and sometimes it just doesn’t sink in,” he says, “but you step back and you say, ‘Wow, that was something really great that we did.’”

To illustrate the difference Webb’s infrared view of the cosmos will make, he pulls up side-by-side images taken by Hubble of towers of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula known as the “Pillars of Creation.”

One of the images, taken using visible light, is ethereally beautiful, like a detail from a ’70s rock concert with a kick-ass laser light show and smoke machines on full blast. But the other, taken using infrared light (Hubble has limited infrared capabilities), is so sharply, densely brilliant with stars that it resembles a close-up of a diamond-encrusted dress.

“If you want to look into clouds of gas and see stars forming . . . the infrared light’s longer wavelength just kind of goes right in—or in this case comes right out—so you can see
objects that are enshrouded in dust,” Sembach explains.

But it’s not just about clearer images. It’s about what those images can tell us—and it’s a long list.

“We can answer questions like when did the first stars and galaxies form. . . . Those first stars that formed black holes and were the nuclei for galaxies, what did they look like? When did those stars and black holes start shaping the medium around them? How did those galaxies evolve over 13 billion years to the kinds of galaxies we see today? How do stars form? We still don’t really know how stars form. That’s kind of amazing,” Sembach says.

Then there is the wish-list question.

“Obviously, whether we know it or not, we’re on this quest to find out whether there are other planets like the Earth out there,” he says. “We have a chance now, probably not with Webb, but you never know. We’ve done things with Hubble we would have never thought of.”

There is one more major difference between Hubble and the Webb, and that is that STScI can claim the Webb in a way it never could with Hubble. Of course, STScI has been and will continue to be deeply involved with Hubble, but mission control for that observatory is 30 miles down 295 in Greenbelt. But for Webb, both the flight and scientific operations will happen at STScI. In fact, the command center at STScI is under construction right now. “Once it’s up in the sky,” Sembach acknowledges, “it is, for lack of a better term, ours.” Which means that, to a very large extent, it’s also his.

If you have to rest the weight of an $8.7 billion space-exploration project on one person’s shoulders, Sembach seems a good choice. After receiving an undergraduate degree in physics (with honors, naturally) from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he earned a three-year fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following that, he stayed on at MIT for a year and a half before coming to Hopkins to work on a project involving ultraviolet light. He joined STScI in 2001 as an instrument scientist for Hubble and, as he says, “moved up the food chain here.”

“Once it’s up in the sky, it is, for lack of a better term, ours,” says Sembach.

He notes that this assignment, which is as much about team-building and leadership as it is about scientific know-how, has arrived at a good time in his career.

“When I was a kid, astronomy was a very personal thing,” he says. “It was mine. It was something for me. And it was that way even well through school and the early part of my career. [There were] things I really wanted to do, things I really identified with that I really wanted to know. And now it has become a broader perspective. A lot of times, it’s the people I work with, the people I meet, the people I can help motivate, that’s what gets me up in the morning.”

But there are other things in life besides work, even for Sembach, who rarely takes vacations and says he is “on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” When asked to name his hobbies, he cites gardening, woodworking, and running, but you get the impression he could survive without them if he had to. Only one thing seems to truly rival his passion for work.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Marguerite,” he says, referring to his wife, Marguerite Hoyt, a writer, historian, and former women’s studies professor at Goucher College. “One of my favorite things to do is just sit at the coffee shop and talk with her. We talk about everything, what she’s doing, what I’m doing—science, history, politics.”

The couple met during their first day of freshman orientation at the University of Chicago, and their union, by both accounts, is rare in its compatibility and devotion.

“We’re very close. We are absolutely a real team,” says Hoyt. “It’s as simple as, when he gets home every night, we cook dinner together. He does all the chopping, and I do all the cooking. My mother has said, ‘You guys are like a ballet in the kitchen. You work together so well.’ And we do. It’s almost like we can read each other’s minds sometimes.”

And though Hoyt admits her husband’s job can be an occasional inconvenience, she has long since accepted its central place in their life.

“A long time ago, just before we were getting married, I was complaining about him being an astronomer and being out of town all the time and working all the time,” she recalls. “And another astronomer’s wife, who is a friend of mine, she looked at me and she said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You knew exactly what his job was going to be when you got together with him. So you can’t complain about this.’ And I thought, ‘She’s absolutely right. I cannot complain about this because I knew this is what his life would be and what he wanted so badly.’ You kind of have to make peace with that.”

A few years ago, Hoyt quit her job at Goucher and now devotes herself to creative writing projects and keeping the home fires burning at their house in Ellicott City. She says she doesn’t regret leaving academia and takes pride in her “tiny contribution” to her husband’s noble mission.

And it is noble—though Sembach is too Midwesternly modest to use the word himself. But it is obvious he thinks of the Webb as the next great leap for mankind.

“James Webb is the largest science project this country is doing,” he says. “It’s going to be amazing, it’s going to be absolutely amazing. At some point, we’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we did that.’”

Wheel of Time

August 15, 2015
North Market Street, Frederick

“My strategy is to stay on the far right and not die,” says 58-year-old Nick Ackermann, smiling beneath a bushy mustache and protective headgear that resembles a brimless pith helmet.

Nearby, two-dozen-plus fellow penny-farthing enthusiasts—many, like Ackermann, in tweed and knickers—climb atop 4-foot tall bicycles, preparing for the 4th annual Frederick Clustered Spires High Wheel Race, the only U.S. competition of its kind. Fittingly, a barbershop quartet performs “The Star-Spangled Banner” just prior to the blast of the starter’s horn, which sends the riders scurrying around the .4-mile circuit, ringed with 5,000 spectators.

Proving Ackermann’s point about the danger inherent in navigating a race while mounted on turn-of-the-century-style bikes, there’s a pretty good crash two-thirds of the way through the event.

Ultimately, Angela Long, a senior V.P., mom of two, and avid cyclist, racing in heels no less (“The extra inches to help me climb up,” she says) takes the women’s competition. And Eric Cameron, an Air Force biomedical engineer and runner, takes the men’s title, falling just a lap short of the one-hour course record. A novice who just turned 42, Cameron watched last year from a local pub and jumped at the chance to compete when a friend’s husband, who owns a high-wheeler, suffered an injury this summer.

“I guess now we’ll have to buy him one,” his wife Jill says, standing next to him afterward. “Maybe for his birthday.”

“Or my mid-life crisis,” says Cameron, still breathing hard.

String Theory

July 25, 2015
Eastern Avenue

“Does anybody know what ukulele means in Hawaiian?” Victoria Vox asks the packed beginner’s workshop at the Creative Alliance. Several hands shoot up. “Jumping flea—that’s right,” says Vox, explaining how 19th-century Hawaiians marveled at the quick fingerboarding of migrant Portuguese sugar-cane workers on their native country’s compact instrument. Which, of course, Hawaiians soon made their own, substituting catgut for traditional steel strings. “I’m pretty sure they just got tired of the cuts and blood from those steel strings,” laughs Vox.

The host of the all-day, second annual Charm City Ukulele Festival, Vox, a Baltimore transplant who has graced the cover of Ukulele magazine and tours extensively, is leading three of the seven uke classes—there’s also a Hula workshop—and performing at tonight’s show.

Other ukulelists this evening include Hawaiian-native Glen Hirabayashi, who performs regularly in the region with The Aloha Boys, and Louisa Hall, a Northern Virginia-based songwriter who often infuses her cheerful strumming and pleasing tenor with darker lyrics. Her set includes numbers such as “Irrational Fears,” “Internet Love Song”—a disturbing chronicle of online dating experiences—and “Missed Connections,” an upbeat tune in which she stalks a stranger getting off the D.C. Metro.

“I was attracted to the ukulele because it’s portable fun, but I get creepy and obsessive, too,” Hall says, adding that her musical training consists mostly of singing in the car and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. “I often describe myself as ‘aggressively jolly.’”

Tiny Love Songs

August 9, 2015
Belair Road

The volunteer-run Natural History Society of Maryland, which is hard to miss given the replica dinosaur out front, has its unusual collection of taxidermied wildlife, pressed butterflies, and sea turtle skulls on public display this afternoon. But today’s main attraction is a presentation by entomologist Cathy Stragar called Summer’s Singing Insects, about the katydids, crickets, and cicadas that make up the season’s outdoor chorus.

Stragar, who works at the Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab at the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, explains that many insects make music by a process known as stridulation—or rubbing body parts together at incredibly fast speeds. A male cricket, for example, uses one wing as a plane and the other as a scraper/bow, playing to attract female partners.

Cicadas, however, use a different method, popping an abdominal noisemaker called a tymbal, which can produce sounds over 100 decibels. “Males close their ears to literally prevent them from going deaf,” she says.

Some grasshoppers, on the other hand, emit supersonic sounds that humans can’t hear.

As part of the lecture, the first in a bimonthly series at the Natural History Society, Stragar plays recordings of crickets and cicadas. She notes the local varieties of each as the small but rapt audience nods in recognition of certain familiar chirps and whistles.

“Recently, Jurassic-era cricket sounds were re-created,” Stragar continues, adding that paleontologists have reconstructed the fossil wing structures of the modern crickets’ ancestors. “These tell us a lot about what the world sounded like during that period,” she says, hitting the play button on her laptop. “These are 165-million-year-old songs.”

IT’S THE EARTH’S TILT and a location’s position relative to the equator that causes the varying lengths of days and the changing of seasons.

IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE, the summer solstice always occurs sometime between June 20 and 22.

> OTHER LOCATIONS ON THE 39th PARALLEL
include Ibiza, Spain; the Greek island of Lesbos; and Beijing, China.

> OTHER LOCATIONS AT -76 DEGREES west longitude include Kingston, Jamaica and Santiago de Cali, Colombia.

MARYLAND SCIENCE CENTER

Solstice Gala

Saturday, June 20

DRUID HILL PARK

Solstice Festival
Friday, June 19 (concert)
Sunday, June 21 (festival)

FELLS POINT

Weather permitting, Baltimore street astronomer
Herman Heyn will set up his telescope at the foot of the square in Fells Point on the night of June 21.
passersby will be able to look through it and view Saturn nestled in the constellation Scorpius, plus the red giant star Antares.

Visit the
Maryland Science Center and Friends of Druid Hill Park websites for more details.

It has been a 60-year battle. On January 29, 1951, doctors at The Johns Hopkins Hospital took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks—wife of a Bethlehem Steel worker—who had an aggressive form of cervical cancer. 

Though she passed away eight months later, the tissue that was used without her consent went on to establish the cell line HeLa—the first immortal human cells ever grown in a culture, which have been invaluable to medical researchers ever since.

However, the Lacks family has never been consulted when researchers use this genomic data—something heavily profiled in Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—until now. In August, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made a privacy agreement with the Lacks family. “In 20 years at NIH, I can’t think of a specific experience more charged with scientific and ethical challenges than this one,” says NIH director Dr. Francis S. Collins. “It is truly fitting that her story is catalyzing changes in policy.”

Though the cells have been used in countless studies through the years, her family became concerned this past spring when German researchers completed the first whole genome sequence of her cell line and posted it to an open-access database.

“We were left in the dark,” says Owings Mills resident Jeri Lacks Whye, Lacks’s granddaughter, pictured, with her brother David. “For the past 60 years, we were pulled into science without consent and weren’t given a voice until now.”

The new agreement requires NIH-funded researchers to use a “controlled-access” database of the HeLa cell genome, governed by a panel that contains two of her grandchildren, both still living in Baltimore. “We are happy to be in the conversation now,” Lacks Whye says. “This is important in the legacy of Henrietta Lacks as a person.”

What if spilling Diet Coke on your cell phone didn’t matter anymore?
Solving that problem, and many others, is the goal of new product
NeverWet, developed in Lancaster, PA, in part by Baltimore native and
Stevenson University grad Mat Sterner. 

“Scientists have been studying
this conundrum for decades,” says Sterner, pictured, a research
and development chemist. “When you put water on various materials, it
either makes flat puddles or beads on the surface, like Teflon.” 

But
Sterner says that scientists have been trying to figure out how to give
surfaces a texture, or small towers, that water droplets can sit on top
of. The problem with such a delicate texture is how easily it can get
damaged with a simple touch. But NeverWet’s technology has two layers to
protect that texture. The result is a seemingly futuristic spray that
makes virtually anything—electronics, clothing, tires, house
siding—waterproof. 

NeverWet is available at Home Depot, Walmart, and
Lowe’s, and is retailing for $19.99. “Generally, the reactions have been
describing it as magic, sorcery, a miracle,” Sterner says. “People
aren’t used to seeing liquid just slide right off.”

The opportunities open to high-achieving public high-school students seem boundless today. But in truth, these students have also earned it, not just doing the required homework and scoring good grades, but actively seeking out challenging course work, meaningful after-school activities, and enriching summer “vacation” programs. They build competitive robots, master musical instruments, intern at Johns Hopkins’s astronomy and bio-medical labs, perform on professional stages, and captain school athletic teams. Our intention with these brief profiles is not to stir up old high-school feelings of inadequacy (which we’re sure even these kids experience from time to time), but to offer a little hope. Our schools and today’s students often get knocked around in the media. These students, however—and there are many smart, hard-working others like them—provide a counter narrative: The future may not be in bad hands after all.

Dania Allgood, Junior
Western High School, Baltimore City

A member of the school’s renowned “RoboDoves” robotics team, Dania arrived at Western already speaking Arabic—her grandfather is Jordanian—and versed in Swahili, which she picked up in after-school programs. She’s studied French, Spanish, and Russian, as well, but what Dania also brought to Western, aside from an affinity for foreign languages, was “a huge interest” in math and science—her academic focus.

This summer, she spent five weeks at Frostburg State University’s Regional Math/Science Center camp, working on an environmental project involving water policy, livestock, and the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, ultimately producing a research paper. She carries a 3.5 GPA, and envisions studying computer science at an elite university, maybe even the University of Toyko.

But since joining the RoboDoves as a freshman, Dania has found something new that she loves: working with her hands. “I love using the different machines,” she says, “the hand saws, band saw, the table and power drills.” She’s competed twice with the squad at the robot-building VEX World Championships in Anaheim, CA. “I like that there’s no instruction manual with building the robot, that we have to come up with the idea of how to build it,” she says. “Are we going to do it this way, or that way? I like the imagination part.”

Dania admits, too, with a laugh, that she doesn’t mind beating the boys’ teams that throw sideways glances at the RoboDoves, knocking down stereotypes about what African-American, public-school girls can achieve in science. “They’d scout us at competitions and wouldn’t say or do anything, but when we win, they’d be shocked,” she says. “A lot of people know who we are now.”

Caroline desJardins-Park, Senior
Reservoir High School, Howard County

Winning school spelling bees in fourth, fifth, and seventh grades, Caroline attended the competitive Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth after eighth grade. It might be in her genes: Mom and dad are University of Maryland, Baltimore County computer science professors and lecturers, respectively; sister Heather majors in chemistry at Harvard; and uncle David earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

But even in this group, where standing out academically is a challenge, to say the least, Caroline accomplished something unique—a perfect 2,400 on the SAT’s last year. Nearly 1.66 million students took the test last year in more than 170 countries, with 360 students, or just .022 percent, achieving a perfect score.

That said, Caroline hardly has her head in a book all day. She plays cello in Reservoir’s orchestra, sings with the school’s audition-only Madrigal Singers and the Peabody Children’s Chorus, and traveled to perform in France this summer. (She’s taken the highest-level French A.P. courses offered in Howard County and previously spent four weeks in a French immersion camp at Bard College.) She notes that she’s still not fluent—”I struggle at times to remember the conjugation, it’s tricky,” she says, chuckling. But she is always looking to pursue new experiences and challenges, enrolling in three A.P. classes this year. “In general, when I’m in the easier classes, it’s harder for me,” she says. “If I’m learning new stuff, I concentrate better.”

Credited with spurring her academic career is Howard County’s Accelerated Mathetmatics Program, led for 35 years by Eleanor “Lynn” Collins, who taught not only Caroline’s mother and her mom’s siblings in the 1970s, but her sister, too. Ultimately, she would like to attend Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. She’s ridden horses since the third grade, working at a stable part-time, and wants to continue to work with animals. “It’s what I love the most,” she says.

Gabriel Grell, Senior
Polytechnic High School, Baltimore City

For most high-school boys, scoring the only goal in a 1-0 win over archrival City College high school or being selected to captain Poly’s traditionally powerful track team would serve as a competitive highlight. Not so for Gabriel. Last year, he was the only Maryland student invited to try out—and ultimately one of four named—to represent the U.S. at the 2012 Pan African Mathematics Olympiads in Tunisia.

Growing up in northeast’s Hamilton neighborhood and attending public schools “the whole way,” as he happily puts it, Gabriel’s been involved with the nonprofit Ingenuity Project since middle school. A joint effort of the school system, the Abell Foundation, and Baltimore’s science and mathematics community, the program provides students with a highly accelerated math and science curriculum. Out of this intensive workload, Gabriel qualified to take math classes at The Johns Hopkins University this year through JHU’s Future Scholars Program. That’s on top of his A.P. physics, computer science, and literature classes.

Gabriel has considered becoming a math major—his father is a math professor—but he’s now pondering a career in astronomy after studying deep space with Hopkins professor Henry Ferguson as part of the Ingenuity Project’s research practicum. “The galaxies are very interesting to look at, studying their parameters, micro-analyzing the details of the images from telescopes, including the Hubble,” Gabriel says. “I like math, but astronomy is more of my passion. I like looking out into space, there’s so much we haven’t seen yet, so much we have yet to learn. I’d love to make a contribution.”

Which isn’t to say, he doesn’t have more typical pressing high-school concerns. “I would like to win the City track title,” he says.

Sydney Johns, Senior
Western High School, Baltimore City

Like Dania, her RoboDove teammate, Sydney possesses an aptitude for foreign language, studying Spanish in middle school and then engaging in something a little more unusual—Russian—at Western. In fact, she’s won a national Russian writing award. A lively, high-energy young woman, Sydney’s interests range from student government to urban gardens built on vacant city land. While she’s taken courses like A.P. government and will pursue A.P. courses in human geography and literature this year, her academic concentration is math and science. For now.

She chose Western because it’s an all-girls institution—”It makes it easier to just be yourself”—but wasn’t aware of the RoboDoves program until after her freshman year began. “I didn’t even know they had a robotics program until I heard all this noise down the hallway,” Sydney says. “I heard the power tools and went running down to find out what they were doing.” She credits the RoboDoves’ mentors with improving her math skills and understanding of physics. More importantly, she adds, it has taught her to value teamwork. “I wasn’t someone who worked well with others before. I wanted to do everything myself. I learned you have to allow people to do the things they do well.”

A National Honor Society member, Sydney participated in The Johns Hopkins University’s intensive, four-week Engineering Innovation program for high-school students this summer, designed to encourage students to pursue careers in science and engineering. She will probably pursue engineering, but acknowledges being torn. “I like writing. I like reading memoirs and journals, like The Diary of Anne Frank. I like the humanities,” she says. “It’s hard to choose one over the other.”

Trés McMichael, Junior
George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology, Baltimore County

A vocalist who has performed with the Lyric Opera company, on stage at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, and at Camden Yards—singing the national anthem with 20 students—Trés says what he likes best about his high school is that the students know why they’re at Carver, a nationally recognized arts magnet school. “They’re here because they want to be, and they’re as equally into what they are doing as I am,” he says. “I find that inspiring.” He would know: He’s Carver’s Class of 2015 president and also Baltimore County Student Government Council vice president.

Trés has performed since attending Sudbrook Middle School, also a nationally recognized arts magnet school. (In fact, there’s a four-year-old YouTube clip of him covering John Legend’s “Ordinary People” at the school’s Spring Concert to huge applause.)

To improve his craft, Trés attended Opera Camp at the Lyric after his freshman and sophomore years. He’s sung with the Baltimore County High School Honor Chorus for two years, twice earning first chair. A baritone, Trés won a first-place Mid-Atlantic award in musical theater from the National Association of Teachers of Singers. He’s also won three NAACP ACT-SO gold medals for Baltimore County, two in contemporary vocals, one in classical. And, he was recently awarded an NEA award to study ballet.

He’d love to be the next John Legend or Ray Charles—”My style is more old-school than new-school”—but intends to attend Howard University to pursue a fine arts degree and master’s in education. He says he’s learned a lot through community service work, including a better understanding of the human condition, which informs his art. He likes teaching younger students to sing. He’ll take a shot at a performance career, however, he has a back-up plan. “I’d love to be on Broadway,” he says. “But I really love teaching other students to learn to sing. What I’d really like is to own a community arts center.”

Noah Scholl, Senior
River Hill High School, Howard County

By his own admission, Noah is not the world’s hardest-working student. “I’m definitely a bit lazy,” he says. Not obsessed with grades or awards, the 17-year-old does pursue, however, a balanced, thoughtful life. He spends free time playing music, including the piano—which he’s studied for 12 years and played with the McDaniel College Jazz Ensemble—and the alto sax. He reads a lot—”There are stacks and stacks of books under my bed,” he says—walks to school and plays Ultimate Frisbee at River Hill. “I’m not involved in a lot of school activities,” he says, though he does compete in fencing outside of school, participating in the USA National Championships.

His unweighted G.P.A. is a “3.5 or 3.6,” and he knows he could do better. He didn’t particularly like Spanish—”easily my worst subject,” he says—because of the labor-intensive nature of foreign language. And yet, in spite of his relatively laid-back approach—or perhaps, because of it—like desJardins-Park, Noah nailed a perfect SAT. He also scored a perfect 36 on his ACT to prove it wasn’t a fluke. “I’ve always been someone who tests well,” he says understatedly. Other than being a voracious reader, he didn’t do anything special to prepare for either exam, he says.

Not that he doesn’t pursue a rigorous academic schedule, or lacks ambition. Noah took a full load of A.P. classes as a junior—everything from English and psychology to chemistry and calculus—and will again this year. His favorite class has been A.P. anatomy and he’s interned at Johns Hopkins’s Oncology Department, learning about cancer research. He plans to pursue a career in bio-medical research, either at a place like the National Institutes of Health or a large university. “I feel like that’s where I can make a positive change in the world,” he says. “Not to mention, it’s just my favorite thing. I find it incredibly interesting.”

As far as celebrating New Year’s Eve in Iraq goes, the holiday was going well for Jonathan Kuniholm. He had spent the last evening of 2004 with a few dozen fellow Marines and Army soldiers, taking a break from the war to enjoy a talent show at the chow hall. Using a borrowed acoustic guitar, he played and sang “Driver 8” by R.E.M., and a bluegrass version of “Greensleeves.”

The next day, while investigating a grove of palm trees along the Euphrates River, an improvised explosive device blew up in the middle of a clearing and knocked Kuniholm to the ground. The blast broke his rifle in half and nearly severed his lower right arm. A medic applied a tourniquet to the shattered arm, which was later amputated below the elbow.

He doesn’t like to talk about it. “I’m glad I’m not dead,” says Kuniholm, 35. “Anything after that is a gift.”

But get him talking about his life since, and the words flow much more freely. When he’s not working as a Duke University doctoral student in biomedical engineering—he may eventually benefit from his own research into grasp control—he works at an industrial design firm he co-founded almost four years ago in Durham, North Carolina. But every day, he is still making the transition to life as an amputee.

“If I need to test the bathwater to see if it’s too hot for my son, I’m going to do it with my other hand,” he says. “If I’m going to hold my son’s hand, I’ll use my other hand.” His son will still hold the prosthesis without complaint, and so will other children. But he has to look at where his prosthetic hand is to see if anyone is on the other end. “It takes me a little longer to tie my shoes. It takes me a little longer to put on my pants. As long as I know and understand and don’t let it frustrate me, there’s not a whole lot I can’t do.”

When he plays guitar now, his left hand’s fingers press the strings against the frets, changing chords like always. But the guitar pick goes in a prosthetic hand that strums only—no finger picking. “It chews up my guitar a little bit. If I miss with the pick, I gouge it all up,” he says.

Like many amputees, Kuniholm has a different prosthesis for different tasks. There’s his body-powered prosthesis, which operates with cables and rubber bands. When he moves the rest of his arm, the hand end opens and closes based on the distance between the hand and harness strapped to his opposite shoulder.

He also has a myoelectric prosthesis, activated by electrical impulses from his forearm muscles, but he doesn’t wear it because other prosthetics work better. The one he uses for flying airplanes is shorter than a regular arm and doesn’t bend. And he has another with a basic hand prosthetic, complete with a cosmetic covering, which helps minimize the stares of strangers. He uses yet another to control a stylus when he is doing his design work.

“Prosthetics tend to do very few things well,” he says.

Despite the swath of medical marvels and technological strides made in helping patients, prosthetic hands have long been left behind on the evolutionary ladder. Hand and arm prosthetics have evolved very little from simple, crude approximations of the natural limb developed decades ago. Look at the current technology for prosthetic legs, for example: The devices let amputees climb stairs, run a marathon, drive a car, or kick a ball with a child.

“Why can’t we do that for the arm and the hand?” asks Colonel Geoffrey Ling, program manager at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is overseeing a project to improve prosthetics. “The best hand prosthetic one can get is a hook, right out of Peter Pan.”

Its functions are limited, and it’s inflexible. “It’s heavy, it’s clumsy, [and] cosmetically, it’s just horrid,” says Ling.

Something is, finally, being done. Ling and Kuniholm are both part of a $70 million effort by the federal government to change that frustrating fact. And they’re just two of hundreds of people attempting to build a better arm for the many American soldiers who have undergone amputation following injury while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Spearheading this work is the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, just down the road from Baltimore. The legendary facility—one that is known for its innovative military and aerospace technology—is leading an international 250-person effort to create an artificial arm that works as well as a natural one.

The project’s goals are lofty: APL hopes to design an arm that can sense temperature, touch, and vibration, and that can sense the position of the arm and hand relative to the body. An arm that can tolerate heat, cold, water, humidity, and dust. An arm that will allow an amputee to regain the fine motor control needed to thread a needle, use a computer keyboard, or play a piano or a guitar. And a hand that will not just strum a guitar, but one that will let the wearer use the prosthetic fingers to perform fretwork and change chords.

The arm must also fit comfortably enough to use for 18 hours a day, and have the internal power to work for at least 24 hours.

Right now, “the best hand prosthetic one can get is a hook, right out of Peter Pan,” says Colonel Ling.

And it has to last for 10 years.

The first phase of the project—dubbed Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2007—aims to integrate existing technologies and map out areas of research for a new kind of mechanical arm. Last year, the APL won a $30.4 million grant to develop an entirely new arm that works like a biological limb. APL is serving as the project’s lead institution, working with dozens of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Europe, plus research and industry leaders such as Otto Bock Health Care of Germany and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Hopkins’ schools of medicine, engineering, and public health are working on the project as well.

If DARPA officials like the results, the lab will get another $24.4 million toward the project’s second phase. That project—called Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009—will create an arm that transmits data to and from the brain; it aims to create an arm that is sensitive enough to sense temperature and texture, yet strong enough to lift a suitcase.

Possibly the earliest evidence of amputation and prosthetic surgery came from the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, where archaeologists uncovered a mummy dated to between 1550 and 700 B.C. According to The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, the woman’s big toe had been amputated and replaced with a wooden prosthesis that was painted dark brown. Two wooden plates and seven leather strings held in place a perfectly shaped big toe, even including the nail.

Centuries later, in 484 B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about an imprisoned Persian soldier named Hegesistratus. With one foot bound in wooden and iron stocks, he cut off part of his own foot and escaped. Later, he wore a wooden replacement and became an enemy to Sparta.

In the U.S., prosthesis technology advanced during the Civil War, which produced some 50,000 amputees. Government funding for Civil War veterans and the discovery of anesthetics allowed longer surgeries to attach more functional prosthetics. World War II produced nearly 7,500 major amputations, spurring development of currently used technology. Today, prosthetics consist mostly of body-powered mechanical parts made of straps, bands, metal, wood, and plastic—and no matter how they are assembled, they are a poor substitute for one of the human body’s most dynamic and elegant devices.

“The human limb system is an incredibly complex and very amazing system,” says Stuart D. Harshbarger, program director at the Applied Physics Lab. “Look at how strong a human hand is. For its volume, it’s fast, dexterous. It’s silent when you move it. Its skin covering doesn’t leave big baggy areas when you move it,” he continues. “It’s a very highly integrated biological system that’s remarkably capable.”

The big challenge, explains Harshbarger, is to copy the arm’s mechanical systems and fit them into the space of a human limb. In this case, the goal is to make something no heavier than a woman’s arm (which weighs an average of seven pounds) that can lift up to six times as much as its weight. An arm made of existing mechanical parts would weigh six times that much.

Part of the problem facing developers is that arms and hands are far more complicated than legs and feet. Hands have between 20 and 30 tiny muscles and joints that allow someone to type, button a shirt, pick up a pencil, or carry a grocery bag. Toes and feet help with a much smaller range of balance and mobility tasks.

Researchers started by looking at current leading-edge technologies ranging from state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs to robotics to spacesuits that allow astronauts to manipulate their hands. By the end of last year, they finished Prototype 1, which was designed to have “seven degrees of freedom.” Proto 1, as developers call it, can move at the shoulder and in two ways at the elbow, flex and rotate the wrist, and pinch fingers together or with the thumb at the top—as if holding keys or a dollar bill.

“Look at how strong a human hand is. It’s a very highly integrated biological system that’s remarkably capable.”

On a rainy Friday in January, in a squat, painted-brick office park in Laurel, researchers at APL are packing up Prototype 1 for a trip to Chicago, where a double amputee from an electrical accident is waiting to test it.

On the floor, a worker sifts through a plastic tub of startlingly lifelike prosthetic arm covers, selecting one for the strapping mannequin representing the modern American soldier. Under harsh fluorescent lights, a half-dozen researchers and developers click at computers nestled amid piles of papers, empty soda bottles and a half-eaten package of Oreos.

The mannequin towers at 6 feet, 4 inches tall, wearing black combat boots, sand-colored fatigues, helmet, and sunglasses. Computer cables jut out from the left shoulder, which joins a dark gray upper arm the size and shape of a potato chip can. The mechanical hand looks like something out of a Terminator movie.

Presiding over Proto 1’s final workout before getting its first human test, deputy project manager John Bigelow smiles as he describes the action as a programmer manipulates the device using a computer and mouse. The arm rises up and down, the palm turns upward and down, and the fingers slowly open and close. The arm moves a little too fast in first tests, so developers put speed thresholds in place.

“It’s quite peppy,” Bigelow says.

By August, the APL team must deliver and demonstrate Prototype 2, which must show even greater capability. If DARPA likes it, then the group will spend the next two years getting this new technology—which will become the new standard—ready for commercial manufacturing and for Food and Drug Administration review by the end of 2009. Working with Otto Bock, one of the world’s largest prosthetics makers, parts of the new technology will become commercially available along the way.

“What we’re most excited about is the technology that will be developed,” says Dr. Ross E. Andersen, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “It will have a phenomenal effect on the field of prosthetics.”

Researchers are collecting input from the people who know best what a better artificial arm needs. Andersen has gone to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. three times to meet with amputees, physicians, and therapists to ask them their opinions. Soldiers are talking about the kinds of activities they want to do, like skeet shooting, fishing, and water skiing. They want better looks, fit, and function without weightier limbs, Andersen says. “We’re getting some good feedback that will help the engineers come up with something that won’t sit on the shelf.

“We’re not developing some one-shot bionic limb,” he says. “The last thing we want to develop is a limb that on paper looks good but that a patient won’t use.”

Like the human arm, a prosthetic limb has many parts. The “terminal device,” a term borrowed from robotics, is the piece a wearer uses to interact with the world. A hand or a hook usually attaches to some kind of wrist, then a frame that attaches to the wearer’s remaining arm. Different terminal devices do different jobs, whether holding a guitar pick or a stylus. And while one prosthesis might let the wearer pick up a suitcase, it would crush an egg.

Individual prostheses are as different as the people who wear them and the myriad tasks humans do. Some amputees want a prosthesis to help them pursue their passions—playing piano, quilting, or hiking. Looks are most important for others, who want only to avoid cruel or curious stares.

Experts say the commercial incentive is slim to develop a better prosthetic arm. Research and development is slow (but is being sped up by these DARPA projects), and it takes years for any business to recoup product design costs. Researchers have abandoned numerous innovations over the years because there aren’t a lot of people to buy them.

Because of the small consumer market, prosthetics makers must wait for other industries to develop new technologies that are adaptable to their field, says Gary Berke, president of the American Academy of Orthotists and Prosthetists, a 2,500-member organization based in Alexandria, Virginia. Batteries to power artificial limbs used to be huge, but cell phones and other electronics slimmed them down. “We basically leech off of those,” Berke says. Current prices start around $7,000 for a basic above-the-elbow prosthesis, reaching as high as $75,000 to $120,000 for what DARPA is developing, he estimates.

“We’re not developing some one-shot bionic limb,” says Hopkins professor Ross Andersen.

While the federal government is pouring millions of dollars into building a better prosthesis, nobody at Hopkins is going to get rich off the project. Prosthetics is a notoriously low-margin industry. “One of our colleagues was joking,” Andersen recalls, “‘if we’re really successful, we’ll make thousands of dollars.'”

Each year, 82 percent of amputations occur because of diabetes and other complications of the vascular system, the body’s network of blood vessels, according to the National Limb Loss Information Center, based in Knoxville, Tennessee. Nearly all of those amputations—97 percent—happen to the leg. More than two-thirds of trauma-related amputations, however, happen to the arms.

Among the 1.9 million people living with limb loss in the U.S., most of them don’t need a better arm. But the project became a priority at DARPA—which was founded after the launch and orbit of the Soviet Sputnik spacecraft surprised the Western world—after the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Improvements in body armor saved lives, but left survivors with missing limbs. By January 2, Walter Reed had treated 383 amputees from the war in Iraq and 38 from Afghanistan, a hospital spokeswoman says.

“Before the war . . . we didn’t have young people losing their arms,” says Colonel Ling, the DARPA program manager, who served in Afghanistan in 2003 and Iraq in 2005. “In Afghanistan, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t see a kid who lost a hand or a foot from a Russian land mine.”

Part of the new research is looking into how to pick up a stronger signal from the brain when it tells the arm and fingers what to do. In a way, it’s like someone in Takoma Park trying to tune into broadcast television from Baltimore. The signal is clear enough, but not as good as in Fells Point. In prosthetics research, TV Hill is the brain, Fells Point is the shoulder, and Takoma Park is the elbow. The elbow gets the signal, but the shoulder gets it stronger.

In the amputee who will be testing Prototype 1, surgery remapped his remaining nerves at the shoulder to the pectoral muscles (or between the spinal cord), which act like an amplifier of the brain’s signal. Surface electrodes on his chest then pick up nerve impulses—and the brain’s instructions to the arm. In Prototype 2, developers are picking up the brain’s signal in new ways, such as by implanting sensory capsules the size of two grains of rice under the skin. The tiny devices wirelessly transmit sensory data—temperature or touch—back to the nerves.

“The trick is to put the signals back in the brain,” Ling says. “We’ve got to hack into the central nervous system itself.”

Paul Goszkowski changes his prosthesis like he changes his shirt. He wears a different artificial leg depending on whether he’s walking his dog, cutting his grass, or building a pond out of three tons of Pennsylvania bluestone—the project he chose to pull him from a post-amputation funk. “You have to try something so out of the ordinary just to convince yourself that the loss is not going to affect your life,” says Goszkowski, 47, a chiropractor in Federal Hill. “I had to learn how to use a shovel without a leg.”

A diabetic since age 4, Goszkowski developed two small blisters on his toes that wouldn’t heal. Two toes were amputated after bone infection set in; a subsequent surgery led to infection that eventually cost him most of his right leg in 2001. Coming out of the hospital, Gozskowski found little help for a new amputee. He quickly realized he can’t wear his prosthesis in the shower—the mechanical parts will rust—but he didn’t know where to find items for everyday activities, such as a shower chair.

“I was told by the occupational therapist in the hospital, ‘I think Sears carries that.’ I was just appalled. They had taken this leg but couldn’t tell me how to live without it,” Goszkowski says.

After three years of trying to find adaptable wheelchairs and exercise equipment he could use, Goskowski and fellow amputee John Yanke founded the Amputee Center of Maryland, an information network and support group. The center’s website, amputeecenterofmaryland.org, features a handy 120-item glossary of amputee-related terms plus a list of doctors, homebuilders and exercise equipment makers who cater to amputees.

“It’s the frustration level that gets to people. That frustration level is so high,” says Goszkowski, 47. “Imagine your life right now. If you’re driving or talking on the phone, you limit yourself to only half of what you can do.”

Goszkowski and Yanke developed a handbook to answer questions for new amputees, and they wrote pamphlets about how to clean and care for the residual limb. A prosthesis sometimes relies on a sort of sleeve that rolls up over the stump, gripping like a scuba diver’s suit. Halting air circulation around a stump can trigger bruising and infection, and amputees constantly have to care for the residual limb, Goszkowski says.

Many of the amputees who have come to Goszkowski’s group started as healthy people with no major health problems. One man was a sailor sanding his boat. He cut his leg and stayed in the Chesapeake Bay all day; infection claimed the limb. Another was a carpenter who cut his leg on a piece of old timber. One woman in her 30’s slipped and got a splinter when she fell—ironically—down a wheelchair ramp. A few months later, she lost the leg.

Sometimes Goszkowski almost forgets he’s an amputee. Women and children fawn over his 3-year-old dog, a Corgi named George, when the two go for a walk. “If I go in my shorts, and I don’t have a covering on my prosthesis,” Goszkowski says, “it’s like I’ve grown a third eye, and they don’t want to let their kid touch my dog.”

In past decades, the small consumer market forced the abandonment of lots of innovative ideas for prosthetics. The DARPA project ends in 2009, but it will take many years for the advances made at APL and other centers to reach the general public, officials say. When it does, it will cost about as much as a new Mercedes, estimates Ling.

“If I go out in my shorts, and I don’t have a covering on my prosthesis, it’s like I’ve grown a third eye.”

That will be too expensive for people like Sarah Mallon. She was born with her left arm ending five inches below the elbow; therefore, all her mosquito bites end up on her right arm. And neither a prosthesis—nor her left arm—is any good for scratching those itches. Also, since buttons on women’s shirts are on the left side, she says it’s aggravating to button a shirt with the “wrong” hand.

Mallon, 34, got her first prosthetic as a 6-month-old orphan. Her occupational therapist adopted her and raised her in Simsbury, Connecticut; she always wore her prosthesis except when sleeping, bathing, or swimming.

In first grade, as the only kid with a visible handicap who wasn’t in special ed, her teacher had her present her artificial arm for show-and-tell. “Kids asked me how I turned on a light switch,” she says. Using her stump, “I walked over and turned on the light. All you have to do is put it under the switch and push it up.”

“Someone asked me how I tied my shoes,” she says. “I just sat down on the floor and told them to watch when I did it. Ask me how I do something with a prosthesis, and it’s like asking someone how they use two hands.”

Mallon hasn’t bought a prosthesis since age 18 because they are too expensive: Insurance will only pay half the cost of the $8,000 limb. She stopped wearing the device once in the early 1990’s, during a year in Mexico, where a prosthesis would have labeled her as rich and a target for muggings.

A few years later, working at a home for children with mental and physical problems, she accidentally cut a boy with her prosthesis, and stopped wearing it around children. “Since I have my own kids, that means I don’t wear it anymore,” she says.

But last month, Mallon decided to give it another try: her youngest child is now 4, and she feels the risks are now very small—plus her mother offered to pay half of the cost.

Mallon was fitted for her first new prosthesis in 16 years. With straps and a closeable hook powered by back and shoulder movement, “it’s almost exactly like the one I had when I was younger,” she says. One improvement is that it attaches with a sort of silicone “sock” that will prevent it from sliding around so much.

Since she’s not a veteran, she probably won’t see the expensive benefits of the APL’s work for many, many years—and there’s no guarantee that she’ll be able to afford a new prosthetic arm even when one becomes available. But she knows what she wants it to do.

“When I dream, I have two hands,” Mallon says. “My mom says that’s because I see my prosthesis as a hand. It would be so neat to have one with nails that can scratch.”