Jon Friedrich, PhD, professor of chemistry
I’m reading Lab Girl (Knopf, 2016) by Hope Jahren, a geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Hawaii. Jahren reflects on the joys, frustrations, and wonders of becoming and being a scientist, and her explorations of plants and their ecosystems are truly thought provoking. I would recommend it to any aspiring scientist.

Linda LoSchiavo, director of Fordham University Libraries
In his novel Time and Again (Simon & Schuster, 1970) Jack Finney employs time travel to move his main character to New York in the 1880s. While it is both a sci-fi and a mystery novel, Finney’s detailed description of the city, accompanied by period photographs and illustrations, is a history lesson in itself. He shows us the fragility, pain, strength, and wonder of New York.

Brian Johnson, PhD, assistant professor of philosophy
My recommendation is Plato’s Apology, which is Plato’s version of the speech given by Socrates as he defended himself in 399 B.C. The book includes the key ideas we want out of a college education—the examined life—and fits with Fordham’s focus on classical texts.

Mark Naison, PhD, professor of history and African and African American studies
Between The World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is a short book in the form of a black journalist’s letter to his son. It is perhaps the best window we have into the mindset of black parents trying to raise children in a world that still poses dangers and challenges most of their white counterparts won’t face. The book eloquently exposes why black people still feel vulnerable in a “post-racial society.”

Benjamin Cole, PhD, associate professor of business
I recommend Global Dexterity (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013), by Andy Molinsky. Most books on cultural differences focus on little things like whether to bow or shake hands when meeting people. But to work successfully in highly diverse cultural groups, you must understand how people from other cultures may diverge from your own. For example, does your culture require talking up your accomplishments to show competency? In the United States, yes; in Japan, absolutely not. The book shows how to be “true to yourself” yet not “sell out” when working with persons from other cultures.

Orit Avishai, PhD, associate professor of sociology and anthropology
I recommend Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (Penguin, 2015), by Alice Dreger. It surveys recent scientific controversies gone nasty, replete with warring activists, censorship, and outrageous personal accusations meant to undermine legitimate research (including that by Dreger herself). The book will help prepare students for their twin responsibilities of accumulating knowledge and figuring out how to use it to make the world better.

Mary Bly, PhD, professor of English
Julia Claiborne Johnson’s debut novel, Be Frank with Me (William Morrow, 2016), is the story of young woman, Alice, whose boss sends her to Hollywood to be an assistant to an eccentric, brilliant writer, Mimi. Alice is tasked with doing everything she can to help Mimi produce a second bestseller, including caring for her quirky 9-year-old son Frank. It is a fascinating, witty, beautifully written first novel and wonderful inspiration for aspiring novelists.

Frank Boyle, PhD, associate professor of English
I just finished reading The Seven Good Years. a memoir by the Israeli author, Etgar Keret. It is unlike any memoir I’ve ever read because it is written in the style of Keret’s often stunning short stories that are never much longer than three or four pages. If you don’t know Keret’s work, the short story collection to begin with is certainly The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God.  Deceptively simple and fantastically quirky, Keret’s stories send the mind reeling through the relentless contradictions that add up to make us human. 

(Book covers courtesy Knopf, Penguin, and William Morrow publishers.) 

The enterprise, Goods of Conscience, provides livelihoods in Guatemala while also supporting environmentally sound cotton farming and giving work to the underemployed in the Bronx.

It was begun in 2005 by the Reverend Andrew O’Connor, vicar of Holy Family Church in the Bronx. In a lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 7 at the Rose Hill campus, he described the project and stoked students’ interest in either taking part or setting up similar international collaborations.

“Father O’Connor gave an inspiring lecture,” said assistant professor of chemistry Jon Friedrich, Ph.D., who arranged the event. Students in the Environmental Science and Environmental Policy programs attended, along with members of Students for Fair Trade and Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice.

“He has the ability to combine artistry, spirituality, and environmental justice into his projects in a unique way,” according to Friedrich. “Our students … were able to hear how relatively simple actions can legitimately affect other people’s lives for the better.”

Goods of Conscience uses “Social Fabric” that is produced in cooperation with Textiles Proteje, a foundation serving the needs of Guatemalan Mayan weavers. O’Connor provides a synthetic, reflective yarn that the weavers combine with rare organic cotton, and the finished fabric is shipped to the Bronx, where it is fashioned into clothing by local garment workers.

The cotton is a heritage strain that naturally resists pests. It is produced through environmentally sound methods on the last commercial cotton farm left in Guatemala, and grows in vibrant colors because of the humid climate.

The distinctive reflective yarn used in the clothing ensures that it can’t be counterfeited, so workers can earn a living wage, O’Connor said. The clothing has gained visibility; some of it was modeled by Cameron Diaz in a 2009 issue of Vogue.

O’Connor got the idea for the project during a retreat in rural Guatemala. He wanted to help preserve the tradition off back-strap weaving and help the weavers earn a living wage.

The project has brought electricity to homes in one Guatemalan village and enabled residents to start building a church and community center, he said. Goods of Conscience has gotten involved in other projects, like helping to raise funds to construct a granary in the Ecuadorean village of Cotopaxi.

In the Bronx, the organization also offers courses in home arts, recycling, and conserving resources. Goods of Conscience also promotes local gardening, and will establish a yard this spring this spring to grow hops for use by the Bronx Brewery.

“It’s been growing pretty organically,” O’Connor said, referring to Goods of Conscience. “I just really want to enable people to be able to come up with ideas that are very generative, that help to promote Catholic social teaching.”

He said students could help in many ways—by working with children in the church’s grammar school, for instance, or by helping with gardening projects or helping to market Social Fabric clothing. “There are opportunities to come and help,” he said.

—Chris Gosier

But when a string of meteorites made their presence known on April 22, 2012 via a sonic boom and a fireball streaking across the sky, scientists and residents rapidly enjoined in a new hunt.

After a lengthy search, 77 meteorites were collected, including three recovered within two days of impact. Weighing in at 943 grams, or a little over two pounds, the findings were an impressive collection.

The question then became: What are they made of? For the answer, researchers at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center turned to a bevy of scientists across the globe.

Under the guidance of Jon Friedrich, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry, Fordham’s chemistry lab confirmed that the meteorites are a carbonaceous chondrite of the CM chemical class, a rare type of meteorite that contains amino acids.

Friedrich, a cosmochemist who heads Fordham’s spectrometry laboratory, said his team was also able to tell that the Sutter’s Mill chondrite did not experience heating to greater than about 400 to 500 degrees Celsius; that is further evidence for the primitive nature of the material.

“We analyze meteorites in my lab all the time, but when it comes to special stuff, where we see it fall, it’s probably every couple years or so,” he said.

What was notable about the Sutter’s Mill project, the findings of which were published in the December issue of Science magazine, was the speed in which it was completed. Because the meteorites were located so quickly (within a day or two of their arrival), they were untainted by their surroundings on Earth. So the researchers involved likewise hastened their pace to analyze them.

Friedrich, for instance, said he completed his analysis of a sample in two days instead of the normal full week.

“This was a good example of what scientists can do quickly and accurately when they have an interesting sample come around,” he said.

“A lot of meteorites fall in the desert and sit there for a 1,000 years. Over time, being on the earth changes them, so it limits what we can really tell about them,” he said.

The Sutter’s Mill meteorite fragments were also collected just before a rainstorm might have altered their pristine condition.

“It is exciting that it didn’t take long.”

With 70 authors credited in the paper, titled “Radar-Enabled Recovery of the Sutter’s Mill Meteorite, a Carbonaceous Chondrite Regolith Breccia,” Friedrich noted that it also illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of science today.

“Every single person on the paper had a specific role and specific expertise,” he said. “Small pieces of the puzzle were done by all these different people.”

In addition to the way the Sutter’s Mill meteorite was discovered and analyzed, the questions about its origins also make it unique, Friedrich said.

“This meteorite seems to look a lot like it originates within the orbit of some comets. That is exciting because we’re pretty sure that we know, just from their orbits, that most meteorites come from asteroids,” he said.

“So this could be a piece that maybe came from a comet, as opposed to just being from a meteorite. [The compositional differences] are exciting because they tell us more about the origin of our solar system.”

Before this spring, Sutter’s Mill, a sawmill in Coloma, Calif., was known primarily for its prominence during the 19th Century gold rush.

But when a string of meteorites made their presence known on April 22 via a sonic boom and a fireball streaking across the sky, a new hunt was enjoined by scientists and residents.

After a lengthy search, 77 meteorites were collected, including three recovered within two days of impact. Weighing in at 943 grams, or a little over two pounds, it was an impressive collection.

The question then became: What are they made of? For the answer, researchers at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center turned to a bevy of scientists across the globe.

Under the guidance of Jon Friedrich, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry, Fordham’s Chemistry lab confirmed that they are a carbonaceous chondrite of the CM chemical class, a rare type of meteorite that contains amino acids.

Friedrich said they were also able to tell that the Sutter’s Mill chondrite did not experience heating to greater than about 400 to 500 degrees Celcius, which he said is further evidence for the primitive nature of the material.

“We analyze meteorites in my lab all the time, but when it comes to special stuff, where we see it fall, it’s probably every couple years or so,” he said.

What was notable about the Sutter’s Mill project, the findings of which were published in the December issue of Science Magazine, was the speed in which it was completed. Because the meteorites were located so quickly, they were untainted by their surroundings on Earth. So the 50 researchers involved likewise hastened their pace to analyze them.

Friedrich, for instance, said he completed his analysis of a sample in two days instead of the normal full week.

“This was a good example of what scientists can do quickly and accurately when they do have an interesting sample come around,” he said.

“A lot of meteorites fall, and let’s say they fall in the desert and sit there for a 1,000 years. Well, over time, being on the earth changes them. So it limits what we can really tell about them. But with this, literally a day later it was collected. So it exciting that it didn’t take long.”

With 50 authors credited in the paper, titled “Radar-Enabled Recovery of the Sutter’s Mill Meteorite, a Carbonaceous Chondrite Regolith Breccia,” Friedrich noted that it also illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of science today.

“Every single person on the paper all had a specific role, and specific expertise,” he said. “Small pieces of the puzzle were done by all these different people.”

In addition to the way the Sutter’s Mill asteroid was discovered and analyzed, Friedrich said the questions about its origins also make it unique.

“This meteorite seems to look a lot like the orbit of some comets, which is exciting because we’re pretty sure that we know, just from their orbits, that most meteorites come from asteroids,” he said.

“So this could be a piece that maybe came from a comet, as opposed to just being from a meteorite. Both are exciting possibilities.”

Students learned about new service opportunities on Feb. 7 during a visit from the founder of a Bronx-based clothing enterprise that helps poor Guatemalan communities.

“Goods of Conscience,” based on Watson Avenue in the Bronx, provides livelihoods in Guatemala while also supporting environmentally sound cotton farming and giving work to the underemployed in the Bronx. Its founder, the Rev. Andrew O’Connor, vicar of Holy Family Church, described the project and stoked Fordham students’ interest in either taking part or setting up similar international collaborations.

Goods of Conscience uses “Social Fabric” that is produced in cooperation with Textiles Proteje, a foundation serving the needs of Guatemalan Mayan weavers. O’Connor provides a synthetic, reflective yarn that the weavers combine with rare organic cotton, and the finished fabric is shipped to the Bronx, where it is fashioned into clothing by local garment workers.

The distinctive reflective yarn used in the clothing ensures that it can’t be counterfeited, so workers can earn a living wage, O’Connor said.

O’Connor got the idea for the project during a retreat in rural Guatemala. He wanted to help preserve the tradition of back-strap weaving and help the weavers earn a living wage.

The project has brought electricity to homes in one Guatemalan village and enabled residents to start building a church and community center, he said.

In the Bronx, Goods of Conscience also offers courses in home arts, recycling, and conserving resources. The organization also promotes local gardening, and will establish a yard this spring to grow hops for use by the Bronx Brewery.

“The business has been growing pretty organically,” O’Connor said. “I want to enable people to be able to come up with ideas that are generative, that help to promote Catholic social teaching.”

The event was organized by Jon Friedrich, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, and attended by students in the Environmental Science and Environmental Policy programs, Students for Fair Trade, and Students for Environmental Awareness and Justice.

Friedrich is an assistant professor of chemistry at Fordham; Troiano is a senior at Rose Hill, majoring in chemistry. The window they’ve opened doesn’t look like much—a tiny speck of material that resembles a black breadcrumb—but the insights gleaned from it have already changed the way we think about the composition of matter in the early solar system.

Images: Right, Jon Friedrich; Left, Julianne Troiano at the Mass Spectrometer (click to enlarge).

“The great thing about is that it allows us to see what the early solar system was like without having to back-calculate the effect of terrestrial contamination,” Friedrich says. “There’s a chemical signature that occurs in most ureilites known to date… and that chemical signature was not present in Almahata Sitta. We were actually able to say that okay, Almahatta Sitta does not contain that signature, so other meteorites of this class maybe actually somewhat contaminated.”

Friedrich says the chemical composition of Almahata Sitta is intriguing because it’s so atypical (the technical word for “weird”). The most common type of asteroid in the asteroid belt (a vast collection of small objects between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter) is something called an s-type asteroid. If you held a part of one in your hand, it would be heaver than a ureilite of the same size because the s-type would probably about 10 to 15 percent metal—particularly nickel iron, or nickel metal, and it would be gray in color.

“We have the samples, and they’re pretty small—probably the size of a pinky nail,” Troiano says. We grind the samples so it’s easier to dissolve them, then we mix them with nitric acid and hydrofluoric acid and we put them in a microwave digestion system that heats them up and increases the pressure so the samples can dissolve in the acid. When they dry down and they sort of just look like goo.”

The goo is mixed into a 50 milliliter solution and put into a mass spectrometer, which tells the researchers which elements are present and in what amounts. The results are then fed into Excel spreadsheets for analysis.

“One of the things that came out of all of the work that’s been done by people all around the world is that we know the 2008 TC3 asteroid that produced the Almahata Sitta meteorite was a very un-homogenous chunk of rock,” Friedrich says. “Julianne and I focused on the pieces that were ureilitic in nature, which is the majority of Almahata Sitta and the TC3 asteroid. But what we did find was that if you’re a geologist and you had an asteroid and you grabbed pieces of rock, they’d look a little different.”

He says it seems that different pieces of the asteroid did have different internal chemistry to it to some extent. Whether the different parts were formed under different temperatures might be one reason why this is so.

Analysis of Almahata Sitta tells us that not everything in the asteroid belt is of the same composition, which has implications for how these objects should be dealt with should they be nudged into an Earth-crossing orbit. Should an object of sufficient size be on a collision course with Earth, the results could be catastrophic. One of the leading suspects, if not the leading suspect, in the extinction of the dinosaurs is the Chicxulub asteroid, a chunk of rock at least 10 kilometers across that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The impact, at a speed at least 20 times greater than that of a rifle bullet, left a crater 180 kilometers across. It would have caused an enormous shock wave, global tidal waves, a tremendous earthquake, hurricane winds, and trillions of tons of debris ejected into the atmosphere. The forests of the Americas would have been set ablaze. The resulting smoke and particulate debris would have created months of darkness and cooler temperatures globally, and concentrated nitric acid rains worldwide.

Though so-called “slate wiper” impacts are rare (perhaps once every hundred million years), they are a real threat. NASA thinks so, and has created the Near Earth Object Program to track possible impactors and devise defenses, most likely nudging those objects out of their Earth-crossing orbits long before they reach us. How the objects get nudged away depends on their composition.

“One of the things that we’re learning is that asteroids aren’t necessarily big, giant rocks in the sky that are one big piece,” Friedrich says. They can be made up of lots of little pieces sort of weakly held together…and the structure you know is something that’s typically strong, a big piece versus something that is weakly put together in sort of a boulder pile. The official term is rubble pile—that’s what people call it in the asteroidal community. Trying to destroy or alter the course of asteroids with these two different properties is going to take different tactics.”

Friedrich has published on the composition of Almahata Sitta before, including in the March 2009 issue of Nature. We wrote about his work at the time (see “Fordham Scientist Helps Tie Chemical Makeup of Meteorite to Parent Asteroid”). He and Troiano have also published several papers on the meteorite, in the peer-reviewed journals Meteoritics & Planetary Science and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta—a somewhat unusual honor for an undergraduate researcher.

Troiano, a Clare Booth Luce Scholar, has made the Dean’s List for the last two years. She is a cheerleader, a member of the Expressions Dance Alliance, and a member of both the American Chemical Society and American Geophysical Union. Troiano says she was already interested in chemistry in high school, and that two great teachers brought her further along that path.

“I came into Fordham as a chemistry major already,” she says. “From there, I guess, once you make it past sophomore year—kind of breaking point—if you make it past that, you can make it through the rest of the major.”

She’s applied to nine graduate schools, but hopes to attend either the University of North Carolina or the University of California, Berkeley, for their analytical and physical chemistry programs. “UNC is the top school for analytical chemistry—they have a lot of really awesome chemistry going on there.”

Friedrich’s research is supported in part by a Fordham Faculty Research Grant. Troiano’s summer research was supported by her Clare Boothe Luce Scholarship.

“It is amazing to be able to finally positively link an asteroid to a certain type of meteorite,” said Friedrich. “When we look at asteroids in space were only looking at the outside, and the asteroid’s surface has changed from being in the environment of space. For the first time we can actually say, 100 percent without hand waving, how the surface characteristics don’t match the interior. That knowledge gives us a map as to how the exteriors of asteroids change. We can have a better understanding of the population of objects in space and their distribution in the solar system, and what that means for diversity of objects in the solar system.”

Though scientists have been able to catalog thousands of asteroids through spectroscopic analysis, and tens of thousands of meteorites (asteroid particles that survive the plunge through Earth’s atmosphere), they have never been able to unequivocally connect a meteorite with its parent asteroid.

On October 7, 2008, asteroid 2008 TC3, discovered by the automated Catalina Sky Survey Telescope at Mt. Lemmon, Arizona, crashed into northern Sudan, becoming the first asteroid to ever be spectrally classified before striking a planet. Scientists didn’t expect to find pieces of the asteroid because it exploded at the unusually high altitude of 37 kilometers (about 23 miles), but when Peter Jenniskens, Ph.D., of the SETI Institute and lead author on the paper, led an expedition along the approach trajectory in northern Sudan, they recovered 47 meteorites with a total mass of 3.95 kilograms (8.7 pounds). The meteorite search was joined by faculty and students at the University of Khartoum.

Analysis of the fragments, collectively named Almahata Sitta, revealed a rare, carbon-rich type of meteorite called an ureilite.  Ureilites are believed to come from a large organic–rich, primitive asteroid that had melted sometime in its past. The spectroscopic signature of the meteorite and parent asteroid is most similar to F class asteroids, which can now be linked to dark carbon-rich anomalous ureilites. Few ureilites exist in meteorite collections and Almahata Sitta’s unusually fine-grained and porous texture makes it extremely fragile—which is why Almahata Sitta shattered high in Earth’s atmosphere.

Almahata Sitta’s fragile texture suggests that it came from the surface of the original asteroid. This finding makes it especially valuable to planetologists studying the geological history of primitive bodies, planning spacecraft missions to asteroids and working on ways to mitigate the threat posed to Earth by asteroids that cross its orbit.

Jon M. Friedrich received his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Purdue University. He was appointed to the Fordham faculty in 2006, and is a research associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History. His research interests include analysis of chondrites for the investigation of planetary evolutionary processes and chemical processes, chronology and diversity in the early solar system.