Author: Kara Manke

Whether traipsing through the Duke Forest in search of a specific species of moss, using tiny scissors to dismember fruit fly larvae, or spicing up learning styles with celebrity memes and puppies, the quest for knowledge has led Duke students to some interesting pastimes.

Inquisitive students shared their research stories with peers at Visible Thinking 2016

On April 20, those inquisitive students and their faculty mentors gathered to share their stories at Visible Thinking 2016, the annual poster session showcasing undergraduate research from across Duke’s campus.

More than 130 presentations extended to all three floors of the Fitzpatrick/CIEMAS Atrium and featured research subjects spanning from monkey flowers and color-changing chemicals to cardinal numbers and the death of Odysseus.

“As researchers, we are all working on problems that we find fascinating,” said Nina Sherwood, associate professor of the practice in the biology department and advisor to two of the student presenters. “There’s an appeal to seeing others get bitten by the same research bug and feeling that same excitement!”

Over 130 posters lined all three levels of the Fitzpatrick/CIEMAS atrium during Visible Thinking on Wednesday.

Duke junior Ben Brissette’s passion to help people with mental and physical disabilities couldn’t be contained in just one project, so he did two.

The neuroscience major split his time between Sherwood’s biology lab, where he bred fruit flies and dissected their babies in search of nervous system abnormalities, and the library, where he surveyed recent literature on special education reform.

Brissette said the two approaches – one quantitative and reductionist, the other qualitative and complex – gave him a more nuanced perspective on the issue of disability.

And he had to learn to take each at its own pace.

“With a literature review, if you want to read for forty hours straight you can,” he said. “But if you are working with flies, you abide by their schedule.”

Brissette wasn’t the only student pulling double duty on Wednesday. Junior Logan Beyer bounced between two posters as well; one on her psychology research, examining differences the brain’s response to noise in typical children and children with autism spectrum disorder, and the other on her work with the Thompson Writing Program, designing a website to help students with learning disabilities tackle the writing process.

Two students ponder a research question during a quiet moment at the event.

Junior Abi Amadin became curious about her research subject while entering data for a large survey on stress as part of her work study position in the Department of Community and Family Medicine. What caught her eye was a measure called the household Confusion, Hubbub, and Order Scale CHAOS. Chaos in the home is a factor that can negatively impact childhood development.

So Amadin asked if she could analyze some of the data for herself, and found some interesting results: in the families surveyed, household measured chaos was correlated not with income or the number of people in a household, as expected, but with the number of children in the household.

“It was interesting to see the process that you go through in research – first posing a question, and then figuring out how to analyze it.” said Amadin. “I definitely learned a lot.”

According to Sherwood, students aren’t the only ones who learn from the experience.

“Undergraduates researchers are great because they bring fresh eyes and a fresh outlook,” Sherwood said. “From them we get some questions that are naïve, and others that are quite profound, but both force us to think and talk about our work in a bigger context.”

Kara J. Manke, PhD

Post by Kara Manke

Ghost Hunters: Duke Physicists Track the Changeable Neutrino

By Kara Manke

On April 12, 2016

In Faculty, Lecture, Physics

One kilometer below the surface of Mount Ikeno in Japan lies Super-Kamiokande, the largest neutrino detector of its kind in the world. This 12-story, cylindrical chamber holds 50,000 tons of water and is lined with over 11,000 tubes that spot the bursts of light emitted when high-energy neutrinos collide with matter.

Nearly 20 years ago, experiments at Super-K and elsewhere revealed that neutrinos can oscillate or change “flavor,” a discovery which proved that the ghostly particles have mass and upended their role in the Standard Model of physics. Since then, Duke physicists Kate Scholberg and Chris Walter have used the massive detector to further explore the nature of these neutrino oscillations, seeking to pin down how and when they change their flavors and what this might mean for our understanding of physics.

Within the massive Super-Kamiokande neutrino experiment in Japan, researchers travel by boat to check individual photomultiplier tubes that detect bursts of light created when neutrinos interact with water. Credit: Kamioka Observatory, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, The University of Tokyo.

On Wednesday, Scholberg and Walter, along with Duke neutrino physicist Phillip S. Barbeau, will tell the story of neutrino oscillations in a talk titled, “Hunting Ghosts, How a 50,000-ton underground detector revealed the changeable nature of the neutrino and altered our view of the Universe,” presented as part of the Natural sciences in the 21st century colloquium.

In preparation for the talk, Scholberg spoke with colloquium organizer Rotem Ben-Shachar about the nature of neutrinos, what makes them so hard to catch, and what they have teach us about the origins of matter in our universe.

What is a neutrino?

Neutrinos, sometimes known as “ghost particles,” are among the known “elementary” particles: unlike atoms, they are not made up of anything smaller. Neutrinos are special because they are neutral, meaning they have no electric charge, and they interact extremely weakly with matter. They also have very tiny masses: a neutrino has no more than about 1/500,000 the mass of an electron. Because of their tiny masses, neutrinos travel at speeds close to the speed of light. Neutrinos come in three “flavors”: electron, muon and tau.

Why are neutrinos so hard to catch?

Neutrinos only interact only via the weak force — this is one of the four known forces, the others being gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force which holds atomic nuclei together. As you might guess from the name, the weak force is really feeble, and that means that neutrinos hardly ever interact with matter at all. Mostly they just pass right through things without leaving any trace. Once in a while, they do interact, leaving a charged particle that you can detect. In order to “catch” a neutrino — to detect the interaction — you need either a huge number of neutrinos, or an enormous detector, or preferably both. For example, Super-Kamiokande is gigantic, but we see only about ten high-energy neutrinos per day in the detector. On the surface of the Earth, cosmic radiation can easily swamp a signal this slight, so neutrino detectors are often built underground where they are shielded from cosmic radiation.

When we can catch a neutrino, what do we learn from it?

Duke scientists suspended inside the Super-K detector.

Particle physicists like us try to understand the basic nature of matter and energy: our goal is to learn what the universe is made of, and how its constituents interact with one another. We’re also interested in cosmology — the history and evolution of the entire universe. It’s essential to understand the fundamental physics in order to understand what happened after the Big Bang, and why the universe looks as it does today. For instance, nobody understands why the universe is made primarily of matter and not antimatter, which has properties very much like matter, but with opposite charge. The study of neutrinos can give insight into many questions like this one.

What specifically we learn with a neutrino detector depends on the source of neutrino, the type of neutrino, and how far the neutrinos travel. For instance, at Super-K we can detect neutrinos that come from collisions of cosmic rays, high energy particles from outer space, with the upper atmosphere. These neutrinos travel through the Earth: some of them go a short distance, and some of them travel all the way from the other side of the Earth. What we observe is that neutrinos change from one flavor to another as they travel — it turns out that this can only happen if neutrinos have mass.

The 2015 Nobel prize in physics was awarded for discovery of neutrino oscillations by the Super-Kamiokande and Sudbury Neutrino Observatory experiments. Why was this discovery so important?

The discovery that neutrinos oscillate as they travel — they change their flavor — told us that neutrinos have non-zero mass. This is a really fundamental piece of information. It completely changes the role neutrinos play in the Standard Model of particle physics, and in fact we still don’t know exactly how to fit neutrinos with mass into the picture; how to do this depends on whether neutrinos and antineutrinos are really the same particles or not.

Neutrino mass also matters for cosmology. Since neutrinos have mass, we know they make up some of the unknown “dark matter” of the Universe, but we also now know that neutrinos can only make up a small fraction of the dark matter. Exactly *how* the neutrinos oscillate also matters, as this depends on fundamental parameters of nature.

A 3-D display of a candidate electron-neutrino event in the Super-Kamiokande detector. Each of the colored dots represents a detector that was hit by the light created when the electron neutrino interacted with the detector.

How does your research build on the discovery of neutrino oscillations?

The discovery of oscillations in atmospheric and solar neutrinos by Super-K and SNO has now been confirmed by multiple other experiments, and we’ve made tremendous progress over the past 20 years in refining our understanding of neutrino oscillations. An experiment we are involved in at Duke, T2K (“Tokai to Kamioka”), sends a beam of high-energy neutrinos from an accelerator a distance of 300 km to Super-K. This experiment has discovered new oscillation properties of neutrinos and will continue to take data over the next several years.

But there are still big questions out there about neutrinos — we have three neutrinos, but we don’t know if we have two heavier ones and one light one, or two light ones and a heavy one, which matters for the big picture. We don’t know if oscillations of neutrinos and antineutrinos happen differently. We don’t know if neutrinos and antineutrinos are really the same particles. The answers to these questions may help us understand the origin of matter. A next-generation beam experiment, DUNE, will send a beam of neutrinos 1300 kilometers from Fermilab to South Dakota and may answer some of these questions — and if we are lucky, we’ll also catch a burst of neutrinos from a supernova.

The Natural sciences in the 21st century colloquium will be held Wednesday, April 13 at 4:30 PM in Duke’s Gross Hall, room 107.

Kara J. Manke, PhD

Post by Kara Manke

What Makes a Face? Art and Science Team Up to Find Out

By Kara Manke

On April 6, 2016

In Art, Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Neuroscience, Students, Visualization

From the man in the moon to the slots of an electrical outlet, people can spot faces just about everywhere.

As part of a larger Bass Connections project exploring how our brains make sense of faces, a Duke team of students and faculty is using state-of-the-art eye-tracking to examine how the presence of faces — from the purely representational to the highly abstract — influences our perception of art.

The Making Faces exhibit is on display in the Nasher Museum of Art’s Academic Focus Gallery through July 24th.

The artworks they examined are currently on display at the Nasher Museum of Art in an installation titled, “Making Faces: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience.”

“Faces really provide the most absorbing source of information for us as humans,” Duke junior Sophie Katz said during a gallery talk introducing the installation last week. “We are constantly attracted to faces and we see them everywhere. Artists have always had an obsession with faces, and recently scientists have also begun grappling with this obsession.”

Katz said our preoccupation with faces evolved because they provide us with key social cues, including information about another individual’s gender, identity, and emotional state. Studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) even indicate that we have a special area of the brain, called the fusiform face area, that is specifically dedicated to processing facial information.

The team used eye-tracking in the lab and newly developed eye-tracking glasses in the Nasher Museum as volunteers viewed artworks featuring both abstract and representational images of faces. They created “heat maps” from these data to illustrate where viewers gazed most on a piece of art to explore how our facial bias might influence our perception of art.

This interactive website created by the team lets you observe these eye-tracking patterns firsthand.

When looking at faces straight-on, most people direct their attention on the eyes and the mouth, forming a triangular pattern. Katz said the team was surprised to find that this pattern held even when the faces became very abstract.

“Even in a really abstract representation of a face, people still scan it like they would a face. They are looking for the same social information regardless of how abstract the work is,” said Katz.

A demonstration of the eye-tracking technology used to track viewers gaze at the Nasher Museum of Art. Credit: Shariq Iqbal, John Pearson Lab, Duke University.

Sophomore Anuhita Basavaraju pointed out how a Lonnie Holley piece titled “My Tear Becomes the Child,” in which three overlapping faces and a seated figure emerge from a few contoured lines, demonstrates how artists are able to play with our facial perception.

“There really are very few lines being used, but at the same time it’s so intricate, and generates the interesting conversation of how many lines are there, and which face you see first,” said Basavaraju. “That’s what’s so interesting about faces. Because human evolution has made us so drawn towards faces, artists are able to create them out of really very few contours in a really intricate way.”

Sophomore Anuhita Basavaraju discusses different interpretations of the face in Pablo Picasso’s “Head of a Woman.”

In addition to comparing ambiguous and representational faces, the team also examined how subtle changes to a face, like altering the color contrast or applying a mask, might influence our perception.

Sophomore Eduardo Salgado said that while features like eyes and a nose and mouth are the primary components that allow our brains to construct a face, masks may remove the subtler dimensions of facial expression that we rely on for social cues.

For instance, participants viewing a painting titled “Decompositioning” by artist Jeff Sonhouse, which features a masked man standing before an exploding piano, spent most of their time dwelling on the man’s covered face, despite the violent scene depicted on the rest of the canvas.

“When you cover a face, it’s hard to know what the person is thinking,” Salgado said. “You lack information, and that calls more attention to it. If he wasn’t masked, the focus on his face might have been less intense.”

In connection with the exhibition, Nasher MUSE, DIBS, and the Bass Connections team will host visiting illustrator Hanoch Piven this Thursday April 7^th and Friday April 8^th for a lunchtime conversation and hands-on workshop about his work creating portraits with found objects.

Making Faces will be on display in the Nasher Museum of Art’s Academic Focus Gallery through July 24^th.

Kara J. Manke, PhD

Post by Kara Manke

One Small Worm, One Duke Senior, and One Big Conference

By Kara Manke

On February 18, 2016

In Animals, Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Students

Duke senior Grace Lim isn’t grossed out by the innards of the tiny worm C. elegans. In fact, she finds them beautiful.

As a researcher in the David Sherwood Lab, she peers inside the transparent 1-millimeter creature under a microscope, watching for “cell invasion” — a process that occurs when one type of cell literally bursts into an area occupied by another type of cell.

Grace Lim presenting the results of her research at the AAAS Annual Meeting on Saturday.

Last weekend, the aspiring developmental biologist had the opportunity to take her work to the national stage when she presented at the Student Poster Competition as part of the annual AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C.

“It’s been really exciting,” said Lim. “The researchers here are experts and it is great to learn about their projects. At the same time, I’ve met scientists from all different fields who have asked questions and provided insights that I didn’t expect.”

Cell invasion plays a key role in organism growth and development, Lim said. For example, a fertilized egg will use cell invasion to implant itself into the uterine wall. However, cell invasion can also occur in less desirable processes, like cancer and other diseases.

In her work, Lim created C. elegans mutants that lacked specific genes related to cell invasion. She then observed whether uterine cells in the growing mutants could still invade tissue in the vulva — a key milestone in the growth of the developing larva.

“C. elegans is a good system to study because it is transparent, so you can watch these biological processes happening under a microscope,” she said.

The tiny transparent C. elegans. Photo courtesy of the National Human Genome Research Institute

Her experiments uncovered four new genes that appear to regulate cell invasion in C. elegans. In addition to presenting at the conference, Lim will also be writing up these results as an honors thesis.

Lim, who wants to pursue a graduate degree in biology after finishing up at Duke, says her favorite part of working in the Sherwood lab has been interacting with the graduate students. “We work together to come up with creative ways to solve problems, which is something you don’t always get to do in class,” she said.

And her favorite part of working with C. elegans?

“They have this amazing ability to control their metabolism,” she said. “We grow these worms in petri dishes, and when the plate fills up and they run of out food, they just stop growing. But if you take a few and put them on a new plate they grow again, as if nothing had happened.”

Post by Kara Manke

Kara J. Manke, PhD

Following the people and events that make up the research community at Duke

Author: Kara Manke

Curiosity Takes Center Stage at Visible Thinking 2016

Ghost Hunters: Duke Physicists Track the Changeable Neutrino

What Makes a Face? Art and Science Team Up to Find Out

One Small Worm, One Duke Senior, and One Big Conference