From 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. EDT, alumni are encouraged to make gifts of any size to support their alma mater. And thanks to a generous donor, gifts from undergraduates on June 18 will be matched—making a $10 gift worth $20, $50 worth $100, and so on.

This 24-hour initiative features incentives and giveaways to encourage participation, including lunches with deans, gift cards, Case Western Reserve memorabilia and a grand prize of an iPad.

Throughout today, the Case Western Reserve University Alumni Association—as well as others across the university—will post on Facebook and Twitter reasons to give, ways to get involved and much more.

Alumni, students, employees and friends are encouraged to share their reasons for giving, what alumni support means to them, or even just their favorite memories of CWRU. (Before the Day of Giving begins, faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends—and their friends—can join the event at bit.ly/CWRU-All-in.) For those tweeting their support, be sure to use the hashtag #CWRUallin.

Why a Day of Giving?

Undergraduate alumni participation is an important factor in determining Case Western Reserve’s national ranking. Every gift received—regardless of whether it’s $1 or $1,000—boosts the university’s alumni participation rate, which, in turn, improves its national ranking and reputation and, therefore, the value of a Case Western Reserve degree.

Even more importantly, this support helps provide resources to expand opportunities, offer scholarships, support exceptional faculty members and enhance the university’s facilities—all of which benefit Case Western Reserve students.

Go All [In]

Individuals who have made a gift since July 1, 2012, are “in” and are asked to encourage their friends to join them. Those who have not are invited to be part of the “in” crowd and make a gift—of any amount—to help improve alumni participation.

Remember: Every gift truly matters. In fact, in 2012, 71 percent of all gifts to the university ranged from $1 to $250.

To be one of (at least) 618 donors on 6.18, visit giving.case.edu/allin or join the [in] crowd on Facebook.

Consultants will offer hours throughout each day in SAGES Cafe, in Crawford Hall, and in Kelvin Smith Library, Room 103.  The center also offers online tutoring on Friday afternoons.

Preference is given to those students who schedule appointments on our website in advance, but we will also attempt to accommodate walk-in sessions.

For information on how to get the most our of your WRC session, visit case.edu/writing/.

Questions may be directed to writingcenter@case.edu.

The program is open to any individual who has the desire to end his or her nicotine use and will include:

• An assessment of an individual’s readiness to end nicotine use,
• Identification of personalized motivations and obstacles,
• The development of awareness techniques to avoid possible triggers,
• A step-by-step program for ending nicotine use through self-discovery and
  group support, including behavior change, importance of good nutrition,
  exercise and stress management.

Participants should plan on attending all eight, one-hour sessions in Adelbert Hall from noon to 1 p.m. on:

• Session 1: Wednesday, June 26
• Session 2: Wednesday, July 3
• Session 3: Wednesday, July 10
• Session 4: Wednesday, July 17
• Session 5: Wednesday, July 24
• Session 6: Wednesday, July 31
• Session 7: Wednesday, Aug. 7
• Session 8: Wednesday, Aug. 14

Meeting rooms vary each week; please view the entire schedule for location details.

The program requires no out-of-pocket cost, but registration is required. Register by Monday, June 24, to Valerie Clause, at vclause@easeatwork.com or 216.325.9323.

The series is presented by Ease@Work and is facilitated by Clause, a smoking cessation program certified by the American Lung Association.

The Safe Zone Program aims for a visible network of volunteers who are committed to creating a community of respect and dignity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning students, staff and faculty. This makes it possible to easily identify individuals who are dedicated to an environment in which all people are free to thrive academically, professionally and personally.

Both of the sessions will be held on Friday, June 28 in MSASS 320 B/C—the first from 9 a.m. to noon and the second from 1 to 4 p.m. Only one session must be attended to become a member.

Those interested in Safe Zone training should RSVP to lgbt@case.edu, indicating student, faculty or staff as well as the preferred session. More information can be found at the Safe Zone website.

Ideastream: Evelyn Duffy, associate professor of nursing, discussed how older adults can find new ways to stay active and build new routines as they age. “Maybe going to the mall and walking around the mall,” Duffy said. “There’s whole organized groups of people that are mall-walkers. And that’s a good safe place to exercise.”

The Christian Science Monitor: Michael Benza, senior instructor of law, weighed in on the possibility that the three women held captive by Ariel Castro will have to testify against him in court. “There isn’t a lot that can be done to prevent it because the defendant enjoys a right to confront the witnesses against him,” Benza said.

Design for America: Case Western Reserve students shared the highlights of the branch of “Design for America” they successfully launched on campus over the past year. They explain the different projects they have been working on and suggest the group has made the leap from a student club to a startup.

The New York Times: Many people have had an opinion about the recent disclosure of National Security Agency surveillance information by Edward Snowden. Jonathan Adler, the Johan Verheij Memorial Professor of Law, penned an article that said prosecuting Snowden should not distract from the more important issues.

Monica Montano

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have found that a single gene poses a double threat to disease: Not only does it inhibit the growth and spread of breast tumors, but it also makes hearts healthier.

In 2012, medical school researchers discovered the suppressive effects of the gene HEXIM1 on breast cancer in mouse models. Now they have demonstrated that it also enhances the number and density of blood vessels in the heart—a sure sign of cardiac fitness.

Scientists re-expressed the HEXIM1 gene in the adult mouse heart and found that the hearts grew heavier and larger without exercise. In addition, the animals’ resting heart rates decreased. The lowered heart rate indicates improved efficiency, and is supported by their finding that transgenic hearts are pumping more blood per beat. The team also discovered that untrained transgenic mice ran twice as long as those without any genetic modification.

“Our promising discovery reveals the potential for HEXIM1 to kill two birds with one stone—potentially circumventing heart disease as well as cancer, the country’s leading causes of death,” said Monica Montano, associate professor of pharmacology, member of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and one of the lead researchers.

Hypertension and subsequent heart failure are characterized by a mismatch between the heart muscle’s need for oxygen and nutrients and blood vessels’ inability to deliver either at the rate required. This deficit leads to an enlarged heart that, in turn, often ultimately weakens and stops. The researchers showed that increasing blood vessel growth through the artificial enhancement of HEXIM1 levels improved overall function; HEXIM1 may be a possible therapeutic target for heart disease.

The study, published online in the peer-reviewed journal Cardiovascular Research, is the sixth from the team of Montano and Michiko Watanabe, professor of pediatrics, genetics and anatomy at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and director of Pediatric Cardiology Fellowship Research at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital. Their collaboration began in 2004 with an investigation of why mice expressing mutant HEXIM1 suffered heart failure in the fetal stages of life. The research team found then that the gene is important for cardiovascular development and that it is abundant in the earliest months of life.

This discovery led the team to explore whether increasing HEXIM1 levels could help reverse cardiovascular disease by encouraging vessel growth.

“Our Cleveland-based collaborative research teams revealed that increasing HEXIM1 levels brought normal functioning hearts up to an athletic level, which could perhaps stand up to the physical insults of various cardiovascular diseases,” Watanabe said.

The results build on the team’s findings last year that showed increased levels of HEXIM1 suppressed the growth of breast cancer tumors. Using a well-known mouse model of breast cancer metastasis, researchers induced the gene’s expression by locally delivering a drug, hexamethylene-bisacetamide using an FDA-approved polymer. The strategy increased local HEXIM1 levels and inhibited the spread of breast cancer. The team is currently making a more potent version of the drug and intends to move to clinical trials within a few years.

“Many cancer drugs have detrimental effects on the heart,” said Mukesh K. Jain, professor of medicine, Ellery Sedgwick Jr. Chair and director of Case Cardiovascular Research Institute at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. “It would be beneficial to have a cancer therapeutic with no adverse effects on the heart and perhaps even enhance its function.”

The Case Western Reserve-led research team is now investigating HEXIM1’s ability to improve the health of mice with cardiovascular disease. They are investigating the drug’s ability to reduce the damage from heart attacks.

The research team included faculty investigators Xin Yu, Margaret Chandler, Thomas Dick, Julian Stelzer and Brian Hoit and included investigators from several Cleveland institutions, including University Hospitals, MetroHealth Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland State University.

This research was supported in part by grants from the Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative at Case Western Reserve University, American Heart Association grant 0855543D and National Institutes of Health grants, including funds from the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009: RO1CA92440, RO1HL091171, RO1HL73315, RO1HL86935, RO1HL08157, and R01CA118399.

The finding holds promise for the ongoing push to understand and take advantage of the property. If harnessed, entanglement could yield super high-speed communications, hack-proof encryptions and quantum computers so fast and powerful they would make today’s supercomputers look like adding machines in comparison.

The mathematicians don’t tell us how entanglement works, but were able to put parameters on entanglement by combining math developed for a number of different applications during the last five decades.  In a nutshell, the researchers connected the math to properties of quantum mechanics—the otherworldly rules that best apply to atomic and subatomic particles—to describe physical reality.

“There have been indications that large subgroups within quantum systems are entangled,” said Stanislaw Szarek, mathematics professor at Case Western Reserve, and an author of the study. “Our contribution is to find out exactly when entanglement becomes ubiquitous.”

Szarek worked with Guillaume Aubrun, assistant professor of mathematics at Institut Camille Jordan, Universit´e Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France, and Deping Ye, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Their work is published online in the Early View section of Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics.

The behaviors of materials down at the atomic level are often strange but entanglement borders on our concepts of sorcery. For example, if two electrons spinning the same direction are entangled, when one changes spin direction, the other immediately changes, whether the electrons are side by side, across the room or at opposite ends of the universe. And, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai recently estimated this still unexplained linkage or communication occurs at 10,000 times the speed of light or faster.

Other particles, such as photons, atoms, and molecules can also become entangled but to take advantage of the property requires more than a pair or handful.

Szarek, Aubrun and Ye focused on quantum systems—large groups that have the potential for use in our world.

They found that in systems in a random state, two subsystems that are each less than one-fifth of the whole generally are not entangled. Two subsystems that are each greater than one-fifth of the whole typically are entangled. In other words, in a system of 1,000 particles, two groups that are smaller than 200 each typically won’t be entangled. Two groups larger than 200 each typically will.

Further, the research shows “the change is abrupt when you reach the threshold of about 200,” Szarek said.

The team also calculated the threshold positive partial transpose, or PPT, a property related to entanglement. If the property is violated, entanglement is present.

“From these two perspectives, the calculations are very precise.” Szarek said.

Harsh Mathur a physics professor at Case Western Reserve, whom Szarek consulted to better understand the science, said: “Their point is entanglement is hard to create from a small system, but much easier in a large system. …  And, the thing that Einstein thought was so weird, is the rule rather than the exception.”

The researchers used mathematics where analysis, algebra and geometry meet, Szarek said. The math applies to hundreds, thousands or millions of dimensions.

“We put together several things from different parts of mathematics, like a puzzle, and adapted them,” he said. “These are mathematical tools developed largely for aesthetical reasons, like music.”

The ideas—concepts developed in the 1970s and 1980s and more recently—turned out to be relevant to the emerging quantum information science.

 “We have found there is a way of computing and quantifying the concept of quantum physics and related it to some calculable mathematical quantities,” Szarek continued. “We were able to identify features and further refine the description which reduces the questions about the system to calculable and familiar looking mathematical quantities.”

So, if entanglement is more common in large quantum systems, why aren’t they being used already?

“In the every day world, it’s hard to access or create large quantum mechanical systems to do meaningful quantum computations or for communications or other uses, You have to keep them isolated or they decohere and behave in a classical manner,” Mathur said. “But, this study gives some parameters to build on.”