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UAB anthropologist Chris Kyle, Ph.D., has been visiting the Mexican city of Chilapa for two decades as part of his research. In recent years, murders and other drug-related violence have ravaged once-sleepy Chilapa and the surrounding cities in the state of Guerrero (shown below, with Chilapa at center right). Newspapers and TV stations in Mexico have been intimidated into underreporting drug-related violence, Kyle says, but with the help of blogs and other online sources, he has begun to track the incidents year by year. Below, maps Kyle has produced for the years 2008 and 2009. |
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Chilapa, Mexico, was a world apart. Located in the state of Guerrero, halfway between Mexico City and Acapulco, the small commercial and service center in an otherwise agrarian region was—like many of its kind—isolated by a simple lack of paved roads.
This changed in the 1960s and ’70s as the Mexican economy grew through protectionist policies and state-subsidized industry, funded largely by foreign investments and petroleum revenues in a time of inflated fuel prices. Finally, the pavement—poorly maintained though it was—reached communities like Chilapa, bringing the country’s problems with it.
UAB anthropologist Chris Kyle has created maps showing the locations of violent outbreaks and casualties. Click on the image above for larger versions.“My original work centered on what happens when an unconnected area becomes connected,” says UAB anthropology professor Chris Kyle, Ph.D. Trained as an ethnographer, Kyle has been studying the economic and political environment of Chilapa and the surrounding river valley for nearly 20 years, including three years of living and working in the town itself that resulted in his 2008 book, Feeding Chilapa: The Birth, Life, and Death of a Mexican Region. His research offers some insights into the growth of the drug wars between the Mexican government and regional drug cartels. In fall 2012, Kyle will teach a course on politics and drug violence in Latin America.
More Money, More Problems
“The patch of territory beyond where I worked is one of the most indigenous and poorest regions in Mexico today,” Kyle says. “Within Mexico, the state of Guerrero had received very little scholarly attention and had a reputation for being violent and inhospitable to outsiders. When I first visited it seemed charming and inviting, and the disconnect between my experience and that state’s reputation further intrigued me.”
UAB Researcher Tests the Limits of Distracted Driving
By Matt Windsor
If you are reading this story behind the wheel, do the rest of us a favor and put down the smartphone.
While texting, mobile browsing, and push e-mail have been a boon for chatty teens and globetrotting executives, they are just about the worst thing that has ever happened to the American roadway, says Despina Stavrinos, Ph.D., an expert on distracted driving and director of UAB’s Translational Research for Injury Prevention Laboratory, or TRIP Lab. When the information superhighway meets the real thing, wrecks are bound to occur.
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Can a UAB Magazine editor—and serious multitasker—pass the distracted-driving challenge? Find out in this video.
“Over half a million drivers are injured each year due to distracted driving, and more than 6,000 people die from collisions caused by cell phone-related distractions,” says Stavrinos.
You don’t need a cell phone to practice distracted driving. Old standbys like tuning the radio or applying makeup will also take your eyes off the road. In fact, distraction is probably as old as assisted locomotion. Humans are naturally attracted by novel stimuli and bored with repetition, so we all have a tendency to take our minds off what we are doing when we’re moving around—whether it’s by horse-drawn buggy or SUV.
But you have much more room for error behind the reins of a horse than behind the wheel of a Hummer pushing 80 on an urban interstate. The range of distractions open to drivers these days is wider than ever, too—with cell phones leading the way. “Texting is particularly dangerous because it involves all three categories of distraction: You have to take your hands off the wheel, your eyes off the road, and your mind off the road as well,” Stavrinos says.
Inside the Danger Zone with UAB's Child Safety Expert
By Matt Windsor
UAB child safety expert David Schwebel has helped call attention to the everyday dangers of crosswalks, swimming pools, and dog bites through a series of intriguing, headline-grabbing experiments.
David Schwebel’s quest to keep children out of harm’s way began with a big purple dinosaur. When the UAB psychology professor was an undergraduate at Yale University, he knew he wanted to work with kids even though he was "naive" about how to go about doing that. So he approached a professor doing research in the field, and it just so happened the professor needed help studying a new TV show— Barney & Friends.
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As an undergraduate, Schwebel "It was just so exciting to influence millions of kids," he says. "So when |
Schwebel’s mentor wanted to see if children were actually learning something when they watched Barney, a purple T. rex, cavort around the studio. “We discovered that it was actually fantastically successful,” says Schwebel. The Yale researchers gave Barney’s producers some ideas on ways to increase kids’ learning even more, and the show was tweaked based on that feedback. “It was just so exciting to influence millions of kids,” Schwebel says. “So when I went to graduate school, I decided to do something that would make a difference in people’s lives.”
Since coming to UAB in 2001, Schwebel has done just that. In a series of intriguing, headline-grabbing experiments, he has highlighted the dangers in a range of childhood activities, from crossing the street to playing on a playground and taking a swim at the local pool.
Schwebel’s fieldwork has taken him to local hockey rinks, Iowa cornfields, and communities in Africa and China. As often as not, though, his experiments are based in the Youth Safety Lab in UAB’s Campbell Hall, where danger lurks behind every door. Open one and you’ll find a virtual-reality crosswalk designed to test kids’ decision-making as pedestrians. Down the hall is a contraption, topped by a toy frog, that seeks to determine a teen’s grasp of what is and is not physically possible. Another room contains a scale model of a busy intersection, complete with lights, crosswalks, and a giant mechanical centipede that crosses streets.
These unusual pieces of scientific equipment have helped Schwebel learn some important lessons about child safety—and translate his findings into action that has helped thousands of children around the world.
By Erin Thacker
There is, at this very moment, a time capsule within your body that holds the secrets to the great deeds of your ancestors. Make that a great many time capsules, which also have some very important day jobs—namely, keeping you alive, and possibly killing you as well.
These are the mitochondria, the “powerhouses of the cell” that get their 15 minutes of fame during elementary school lessons on basic biology. Mitochondria provide the majority of the energy in most aerobic cells by using oxygen to extract the energy in food and produce adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, our body’s main energy source. But the mitochondria are much more than cellular power stations. These ubiquitous organelles are also involved in many other critical cellular processes, including growth, replication, movement, aging, and programmed cell death.
The process of producing ATP has the side effect of generating “reactive oxygen species,” or oxidants, the most infamous of which are the free radicals. These are molecules that, lacking a full complement of electrons, steal them from other molecules. This turns the victimized molecules into free radicals themselves, perpetuating a vicious cycle that can cause cellular damage or even cell death. As mitochondria age, they seem to produce more free radicals and less ATP, which some scientists argue contributes to the winding-down process that leads to our deaths.
Mitochondria (red and green) surrounding the nucleus of a cell (blue). Image courtesy of
Xuejun Sun, Ph.D. Mitochondrial dysfunction also plays a role in many diseases, including cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and stroke, explains Keshav Singh, Ph.D., Joy and Bill Harbert Endowed Chair in Cancer Genetics and director of the Cancer Genetics Program in the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center. Singh also is the founder of the national Mitochondria Research and Medicine Society, the first organization of its kind, as well as the research journal Mitochondrion.
Singh is one of a growing number of UAB scientists exploring the boundaries of mitochondrial medicine. Victor Darley-Usmar, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Pathology and director of the Center for Free Radical Biology at UAB, says that mitochondrial research has “been a playground to develop some of the hottest ideas” in biology. In the past few decades, “we learned more about the evolution of the human race from mitochondrial genetics than we did in a couple of hundred years of archaeology.”