Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 18 of 27

Relationship Between Domestication and Human Social Skills

On October 6, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Lecture

Brian Hare wants to know why humans are such big babies.

Well, that was just the provocative title for his Center for Cognitive Neuroscience talk on Oct. 2. What he wants to know is what happens in the development of human babies that socially advances and separates them from their animal counterparts.

Hare, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, discussed human evolution and comparisons to our ancestors and chimpanzees, bonobos and even dogs. He explained that the idea of comparing humans to other species suggests that “something very fundamental happened during human evolution that makes us human– a shift in human development.”

First Hare attempted to evaluate whether certain advanced capabilities of humans are present in other species. One means of doing this was by examining if other species think about the thoughts of others. In a video from an experiment “Gaze” that Hare conducted, he looks at a chimpanzee named Dorene, and then suddenly glances upwards. The chimp follows suit, gazing up at the ceiling to see what Hare is looking at. From this behavior, Hare inferred that chimpanzees are in fact capable of thinking about the thoughts of others, like the human species.

This led Hare to examine another behavior that is advanced in humans: cooperation. Hare explained that in previous laboratory research, chimpanzees were found to be incredibly uncooperative. Hare’s studies in the field, however, proved the opposite. In an experiment with Alicia Melis and Michael Tomasello, two chimps were put in adjacent, but separate rooms. A treat was visible with a string leading to each chimpanzee. If one animal pulled the string, it just got the string. But if both pulled cooperatively, they ended up with the food. The researchers found that 95% of the chimps could work together to solve this problem to get an equal payoff for both of them. Hare did note, however, that if the chimps had communicated, they could have solved the problem more efficiently.

This showed that where chimpanzees might differ from the human species is in their inability integrate cooperation and communication. With children, Hare explains, this is a fundamental part of development that is established early in life. Because of this, Hare wondered if there is something motivationally different about the structure of cooperation between humans and other species, something that also shows early in development.

When humans work together, Hare said, they understand they have a shared goal and will adjust to different roles to complete the task. This has led to, from an evolutionary perspective, a very “strange” behavior in humans, in which they do things together simply because they like to. Hare calls this “we psychology.” Hare showed two videos side by side: one of his son rolling a ball to his mother, Vanessa Woods, and another of a chimp in a cage rolling a ball with Woods. When Woods stopped playing the game, the chimp reached out of the cage and grabbed her arm and pushed the ball so it would roll back to him. From this, Hare inferred that, like humans, chimps may also have a small tendency for “we psychology.”

In another study, Hare compares two-year-old children to adult and juvenile chimpanzees. In terms of physical cognition, the species were very similar to one another. On the social problem solving front, however, human children were already outperforming juvenile and adult chimpanzees. This study, along with the culmination of his earlier research, reinforced Hare’s idea that something very fundamental happens early in human development that differentiates human’s social and communicative capabilities from other species: domestication.

“It’s not just that kids are solving problems better, but it may even be that the way kids cognitively organize has changed,” he said.

Hare explains that just knowing the cause to be domestication was not enough, however. He wanted to understand how this worked. Hare referenced extensive breeding research conducted by Dmitri Konstantinovich Belyaev, in which he studied the domestication of the fox. Not only did these foxes show behavioral changes due to domestication, they also displayed morphological and physiological changes: floppy ears, curly tails and high levels of serotonin. Belyaev also found that, like humans, foxes use gestures and communicative cues. So, Hare concluded that the process of domestication influences a realm of social and biological characteristics and could be manipulated and interpreted in many different ways, especially in our own development.

“This doesn’t just happen as a result of artificial selection, or human selection. It can happen as a result of natural selection,” Hare said. “So then we turn to our own species and start looking at whether there’s any evidence in our own evolution for this.” he said.

By Madeline Halpert, Class of 2019

Mighty Research Grows from DIBS Seeds

By Devin Nieusma

On September 16, 2015

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Science Communication & Education

Groundbreaking neuroscience studies, referred to as the “final frontier” of research by Duke Institute for Brain Sciences director Allen Song, were the focus of the grand opening celebration at DIBS last week.

The Institute celebrated its new home underground at the Levine Science Research Center with a symposium and then a party on Sept. 10.

Faculty and students across multiple schools and disciplines worked together for the chance to earn dibs on DIBS seed money in a competition known as the Incubator Awards. Each project sought seed grants of up to $150,000 for their research in the hopes that they could show enough promise to earn outside funding and continue their work.

Dr. Greg Crawford presenting his project, “Epigenetics of Neuronal Differentiation”

The awards program began in 2007, and it’s working. DIBS seed funding of $3.4 million has been given to 34 projects which then garnered $40 million in federal and foundation grants to Duke.

These research projects have resulted in 36 research publications, three invention disclosures and patents, and more than 30 undergraduate and graduate students becoming involved with pioneering investigations into the human’s most complex organ.

Here are a few of the award-winning projects:

With their project, “Disentangling Autism,” scientists Kafui Dzirasa (Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences); Yong-hui Jiang (Pediatrics & Medical Genetics); and William Wetsel (Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences) sought to improve understanding of the pathology of autism by comparing mice with a gene for autism called SHANK3-KO with those who were born without it.

The team began using brain scans of the mice, after noting the many limitations of comparing behavioral abnormalities of affected mice to humans with the disorder. The brain scans revealed that the mice with the gene had atypical brain connectivity. The researchers intend to work with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to use these results in order to develop drugs that provide better treatment for autism.

“Retinal Imaging Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease,” hoped to improve on the limited and invasive options for diagnosing the disease. A team that included James Burke (Neurology); Scott Cousins (Ophthalmology); Sina Farsiu (Biomedical Engineering and Ophthalmology); Eleonora Lad (Ophthalmology); Guy Potter (Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences); and Heather Whitson (Medicine, Geriatrics) worked in the Duke Imaging Processing Lab to identify Alzheimer’s patients by examining their eyes.

Blue stain shows where the HARE5 gene was active in this unusually big-brained mouse embryo. (Debra Silver)

The same neuro-inflammatory injuries found in the brain may also be seen in the retina, which is much more visible to doctors looking for a diagnosis. While there have been previous studies on the subject, they have been limited by factors such as small sample size and outdated imaging techniques. Using DIBS’s resources allowed the team to circumvent these issues and gather valuable data. The team’s next steps include studying the retina damage’s association with age-related macular degeneration, as well as completing one-year follow-up examinations of the patients’ progression.

“Brain Evolution” was a project launched by Blanche Capel (Cell Biology); Debra Silver (Molecular Genetics & Microbiology); and Greg Wray (Biology) with the goal of learning about the role of enhancers that regulate genes in brain development. The scientists studied how HARE5, an enhancer that is very pronounced in humans, was involved in the development of the cerebral cortex.

Mice raised with human HARE5 were shown to have a 12% larger brain on average than their typical counterparts. This was the first functional demonstration that species-specific enhancers impact development of the cerebral cortex. Future goals of the team include studying how HARE5 affects adult mice, as well as investigating the roles of HARE2 and HARE3.

(Watch video of DIBS education staff Len White and Minna Ng sharing real human brains with visitors to the “Think Inside the Box” kickoff celebration.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N_1uQxWkpw&w=560&h=315]

Post by Devin Nieusma

E-cigarettes might help smoking cessation

By Madeline Halpert

On September 10, 2015

In Behavior/Psychology, Cancer, Cardiology, Global Health, Lecture, Medicine

Research has shown that nicotine replacement therapies such as the patch, gum lozenges and nasal spray are only 25 percent effective in smoking cessation within the first year of use.

Jed Rose, Ph.D.

Jed Rose, Director of the Duke Center for Smoking Cessation, thinks the use of e-cigarettes, or electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) could be a better way to quit smoking.

Rose spoke Tuesday in a session sponsored by the Center on Addiction and Behavior Change.

He said nicotine replacement is delivered at a slower rate and a lower dose than in actual cigarettes, so it fails to curb craving among smokers. Replacements also don’t replicate one of the main sensory behaviors of smoking: inhalation.

Rose discussed a study in which he and his colleagues anesthetized participants’ airways to see if they could detect the smoke, while keeping the same dose of nicotine to the brain. When participants couldn’t feel the smoke as much, there were more cravings for cigarettes and less satisfaction.

An e-cigarette vaporizes nicotine with battery power, avoiding the combustion byproducts of burning tobacco. (via Wikimedia Commons)

They’ve also found that replacement treatments, when given on a temporary basis of just one year, often resulted in relapse.

So what does an e-cigarette actually do? The battery of this electronic cigarette heats an oil that vaporizes the nicotine with a substance called propylene glycol. The gas is released and condenses immediately into a cloud of smoke.

Why is the e-cigarette safer? It’s the combustion products in smoke, rather than the nicotine, that are responsible for most smoking-related disease. Rose cited the 2010 Surgeon General’s Report that backs up this claim that nicotine itself is not responsible for cardiovascular problems or cancers.

Rose thinks that e-cigarettes could be the best of both worlds, allowing smokers the same sensory effects they enjoy, while possibly avoiding other health hazards of regular cigarette smoking.

Rose also addressed concerns about formaldehyde being present in e-cigarettes. He says this is rare, and only occurs with e-cigarettes that have higher voltages which causes overheating to occur. While there is evidence from two trials that the new devices help smokers to stop smoking long-term compared with placebo, unfortunately, very few studies have looked at this issue. Rose also shares concerns that the new product could be picked up by youth who wouldn’t normally smoke cigarettes, or serve as a gateway between e-cigarettes and real ones.

In the end, however, he thinks this product has the potential to be highly effective in treating addiction, and hopes it will be evaluated further.

“The agency that has to sort through this is the FDA,” he said. “They have to prove that it will help society as a whole. It has to benefit the health of the population.”

By Madeline Halpert

Four-Fifths of a Banana is Better than Half

By Karl Bates

On August 24, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Guest Post, Neuroscience, Students

Fractions strike fear in the hearts of many grade schoolers – but a new study reveals that they don’t pose a problem for monkeys.

Even as adults, many of us struggle to compute tips, work out our taxes, or perform a slew of other tasks that use proportions or percentages. Where did our teachers and parents go wrong when explaining discounts and portions of pie? Are our brains simply not built to handle quantitative part-whole relationships?

Fractions and logical relationships are some of the things a wild macaque might think about while grooming and being groomed. (image copyright Lauren Brent)

To try to answer these questions, my colleagues and I wanted to test whether other species understand fractions. If our fellow primates can reason about proportions, our minds likely evolved to do so too.

In our study, which appears online in the journal Animal Cognition, Marley Rossa (Trinity 2014), Dr. Elizabeth Brannon, and I asked whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are able to compare ratios.

We let the monkeys play on a touch-screen computer for a candy reward. First we trained them to distinguish between two shapes that appeared on the screen: a black circle and a white diamond. When they touched the black circle, they heard a ding sound and received a piece of candy. But when they touched the white diamond, they heard a buzz sound and did not get any candy. The candy-loving monkeys quickly developed a habit of choosing the rewarding black circle.

$http://www.free-training-tutorial.com/math-games/fraction-matching-equivalent1.html$

Fractions example taken from sheppardsoftware.com

Next we introduced fractions. We showed two arrays on the screen, each with several black circles and white diamonds. The monkeys’ job was to touch the array having a greater ratio of black circles to white diamonds. For example, if there were three black circles and nine white diamonds on the left, and eight black circles and five white diamonds on the right, the monkey needed to touch the right side of the screen to earn her candy (8:5 is better than 3:9).

We didn’t always make it so easy, though. Sometimes both arrays had more black circles than white diamonds, or vice versa. Sometimes the array with the higher black-circle-to-white-diamond ratio actually had fewer black circles overall. They needed to find the largest fraction of black circles. For example, if there were eight black circles and 16 white diamonds on the left (8:16), and five black circles and six white diamonds on the right (5:6), the correct answer would be the latter, even though there were more black circles on the left side. That is how we made sure that monkeys were paying attention to the relative numbers of shapes in both arrays.

The monkeys were able to learn to compare proportions. They chose the array with the higher black-circle-to-white-diamond ratio about three-quarters of the time. Impressively, when we showed them new arrays with number combinations they had never seen before, the monkeys still tended to select the array with the better ratio.

Our results suggest that monkeys understand the magnitude of ratios. They also indicate that monkeys might be able to answer another type of question: analogies. These four-part statements you may have seen on standardized tests take the form “glove is to hand as sock is to foot.”

This kind of reasoning requires not only recognizing the relationship between two items (glove and hand) but also how that relationship compares with the relationship between the other two items (sock and foot). Understanding the relationships between relationships — that is, second-order relationships — was believed to require language, making it possibly a uniquely human ability. But in our study, monkeys successfully determined the relationship between two fractions – each one a relationship between two numbers – to make their choices.

If monkeys can reason about ratios and maybe even analogies, our minds are likely to have been set up with these skills as well.

The next step for this line of research will be to figure out how best to employ these in-born abilities when teaching proportions, percentages, and fractions to human children.

CITATION: “Comparison of discrete ratios by rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)” Caroline B. Drucker, Marley A. Rossa, Elizabeth M. Brannon. Animal Cognition, Aug. 19, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-015-0914-9

Guest post by graduate student Caroline B. Drucker. Caroline is curious about both the evolutionary origins and neural basis of numerical cognition, which she currently studies in lemurs and rhesus monkeys.

Hugs Before Drugs – The Price of Emotional Neglect

By Karl Bates

On August 3, 2015

In Behavior/Psychology, Guest Post, Neuroscience

Every exhausted parent can be tempted to check out at times, especially when the little ones are testing limits.

A happy child, presumably not neglected, buried in sand. (D. Sharon Pruitt via Wikimedia Commons)

But when moments of autopilot become months or years, that is considered emotional neglect and it’s strongly linked to the subsequent development of clinical depression in children. Ahmad Hariri’s lab at Duke studies emotional neglect, defined as a caregiver consistently overlooking signs that a child needs comfort or attention, even for something positive.

“Early in life, during infancy, an emotional neglectful parent would regularly be unresponsive and uninvolved with their child,” said Jamie Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher in Hariri’s group. “In early childhood, parents would be clearly unengaged in playing with the child, showing little to no affection during interactions.”

In a study published online in Biological Psychiatry, Hanson, Hariri and their collaborator Douglas Williamson of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center San Antonio, found that the more emotional neglect the children had experienced in their lives, the less responsive their brain was to a reward (winning money in a card game). They had scanned the brains of 106 children between 11 and 15 years of age, and then again two years later.

The scientists focused on the ventral striatum, a brain area known to fire up in response to positive feedback. This region is thought to play a role in optimism and hopefulness, and its dysfunction has been associated with depression. The team wondered: Are the kids with dulled ventral striatum activity more likely to have symptoms of depression? They were.

Ahmad Hariri

Depression rates start to rise around 15 or 16 years of age, and that’s why the team focused on this age. The cohort of kids they studied were part of Williamson’s Teen Alcohol Outcomes Study (TAOS), and Hanson and Hariri hope to continue following them.

In a different cohort called the Duke Neurogenetics Study, Hariri’s team has found that the responsiveness of the ventral striatum and the amygdala — another area that handles life stress — may help predict how likely young adults are to develop problem drinking in response to stress or to engage in risky sexual behavior.

Being able to identify the children or young adults who are at risk for depression and anxiety is a tall order. But the possibility that we could one day funnel extra support to these individuals and help them avoid a lifetime of medicines and therapy is what keeps Hariri and his team going.

Personally, as a parent, I’m excited see what the Hariri group will do next. During our interview, I couldn’t help running a few scenarios by him and Hanson. Am I emotionally neglecting my toddler if she’s having a tantrum and I have to leave the room or I’ll scream?

“You can have a bad week,” said Hariri, who is also a dad. “You’re not ruining your kid.”

Guest post by Kelly Rae Chi, a Cary-based freelance writer who covers brain science for Duke Research.

Brain Camp Makes 'Aha Moments'

By Karl Bates

On July 28, 2015

In Behavior/Psychology, Guest Post, Neuroscience, Science Communication & Education, Students

Final presentations for the Neuroscience and Neuroethics Camp were held in the new headquarters of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. (photo by Jon Lepofsky)

Given just two weeks to formulate a hypothesis about brains, Duke’s Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroethics Camp students spoke with impressive confidence as they presented at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS) on July 16.

The high school students had designed experiments using the concepts and methods of cognitive neuroscience to demonstrate what is unique about human brains.

“It was good to see the curiosity, energy, and critical thinking that was present throughout the students’ projects,” said Jon Lepofsky, Academic Director for the Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuroethics camp, the Duke Youth Programs summer program of hands-on, applied problem-solving activities and labs was developed in partnership with DIBS.

The campers dissected real sheep brains

Lepofsky said he was pleased to start the first year of the camp with an engaged, diverse, and thoughtful group of 22 students.

Andie Meddaugh, Xi Yu Liu, Emily Lu and Anand Wong were working on a project involving the logic and the emotion of the human brain. Their hypothesis was that the ability to combine logic and emotion to create a subjective logic shows the difference between human brains and other intelligence processing systems, like artificial intelligence.

Meddaugh said she liked thinking about the brain and logic.

“I enjoy thinking about the problem of what makes us special,” said Meddaugh.

Another group of students presented a project involving the social construct and morality of the brain.

Nicolas Douglass, Abigail Efird, Grace Garret and Danielle Dy are using a hypothesis that suggests if organisms are presented with an issue of resource availability how they respond is a matter of survival. They proposed using birds, humans, and monkeys to test the reactions of each organism as it is placed outside of its comfort zone.

Abigail Efird said teamwork and “aha moments” were the best way to conduct this project.

“It took human ingenuity and scientific development in order for us to come up with different strategies,” said Efird. “It was surprising to see that humans are not as special and are very much similar to other organisms. “

The group’s final “class picture” before heading home to High School.

Lepofsky said at the end of the program, students will leave with a new set of critical thinking tools and a better understanding of decision- making.

“I know the students will walk away with a deeper understanding of how to evaluate news stories celebrating neuroscience,” Lepofsky said. “They will know how to think like scientists and how to ask quality questions.”

Along with developing a hypothesis on the human brain, the students participated in interactive workshops on perception and other forms of non-conscious processing with Duke researchers. They’ve engaged in debates about topics in neuroethics and neurolaw. In addition to that they went on lab tours and visits to the DiVE.

For more information on Duke’s Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroethics Camp visit http://www.learnmore.duke.edu/youth/neurosciences/ or call (919) 684-6259.

Guest post by Shakira Warren, NCCU Summer Intern

Undergrads Share Results, and Lack Thereof

By Karl Bates

On July 24, 2015

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Computers/Technology, Genetics/Genomics, Guest Post, Science Communication & Education

Arts & Sciences Dean Valerie Ashby and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Research Ron Grunwald got the big picture of the poster session from an LSRC landing.

Dozens of Duke undergrads spent the summer working in labs, in part to learn why science is called “research” not “finding.”

“About a third of these students ended up without any data,” said Ron Grunwald, associate dean for undergraduate research, during a Friday poster session in the atrium of the LSRC building for three of the summer research programs.

Biology junior Eric Song gets it now. He spent the summer trying to culture one specific kind of bacteria taken from the abdomens of an ant called Camponotus chromaiodes, which he collected in the Duke Forest. All he got was

Eric Song’s poster featured a photo of the ant and the mysterious white stuff.

“this white stuff showing up and we don’t even know what that is.” His faculty mentor in the Genomics Summer Fellows Program, Jennifer Wernegreen, was hoping to do some genetic sequences on the bacteria, but the 10-week project never made it that far. “We’re only interested in the genome basically,” Song said good-naturedly.

Christine Zhou did get what she set out for, mastering the art of arranging E.coli bacteria in orderly rows of tight little dots, using a specially adapted ink jet printer. Working with graduate student Hannah Meredith and faculty mentor Linchong You, she was able to lay the bugs down at a rate of 500 dots per minute, which might lead to some massive studies. “In the future, we’re hoping to use the different colored cartridges to print multiple kinds of bacteria at the same time,” she said.

Sean Sweat (left) discusses her mouse study.

Neuroscience senior Sean Sweat also got good results, finding in her research with faculty mentor Staci Bilbo, that opiate addiction can be lessened in mice by handling them more, and identifying some of the patterns of gene expression that may lie behind that effect.

Neuroscience senior Obia Muoneke wanted to know if adolescents are more likely than children or adults to engage in risky behaviors. Muoneke, who worked with mentor Scott Huettel, said her results showed the influence of peers. “Adolescents are driven to seek rewards while with a peer,” said Muoneke. “Adults are more motivated to avoid losing rewards when they are by themselves.”

The new dean of Trinity College, chemist Valerie Ashby, worked the room asking questions before addressing everyone from a landing overlooking the atrium. “How many of you wake up thinking ‘I want nothing to happen today that I am uncertain about?’” she asked. Well, Ashby continued, scientists need to become comfortable with the unexpected and the unexplainable – such as not having any data after weeks of work.

“We need you to be scientists,” Ashby said, and a liberal arts education is a good start. “If all you took was science classes, you would not be well-educated,” she said.

_ post by Shakira Warren and Karl Leif Bates

Brain Institute Goes Underground

By Karl Bates

On May 20, 2015

In Behavior/Psychology, Neuroscience

By Karl Leif Bates

From the top side, it looks like a miniature of the landmark Apple store on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan — a simple glass cube.

The entrance to the new DIBS space is just a glass box on the plaza next to LSRC.

But descending the stairs or the glass elevator brings one into the newest, hippest space on campus, the new headquarters of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS). DIBS opened the new underground space at the Levine Science Research Center (LSRC) this week with a reception and lecture.

(The inaugural lecture by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore of University College London, was about her work on the adolescent brain. The peak volume of gray matter in the human brain comes around age 14 and then declines, Blakemore says, but that’s not all a bad thing. It’s the pruning and streamlining of connections that turns a socially obsessed, impulsive teenager into a confident, somewhat-rational adult.)

The atrium of the new center feels spacious, despite being underground.

The 11,000-square-foot space stretches south from the cube and beneath the Blue Front dining hall in a big bay that used to house utilities equipment for LSRC. The ceilings still boast giant pipes marked CHILLED WATER and such, but the rest of it is comfortable, ultra-modern space for brain scientists to communicate, collaborate and learn, with space-saving sliding doors on the offices, and glass garage doors to section off or open up the meeting rooms.

There are actually two levels in the new lair. The mezzanine, ringed by a groovy steel-cable balustrade, provides offices, a conference room, and even a sort of balcony overlooking the main events space where Blakemore spoke.

The lecture hall is a flexible space with a ‘balcony’ of sorts.

The main level below is larger and has more staff offices, two teaching labs, and an airy atrium topped with big ring-shaped light fixtures. A divisible “team room” can be used for Bass Connections meetings or other gatherings, and an even larger multi-function space is set up for lectures, but has a flat floor and stackable chairs, so it could do lots of other things too.

There’s even a little room between the teaching labs that might come in handy for storing brains, DIBS Director Michael Platt points out on an introductory tour.

“We haven’t come up with a name yet,” Platt says. “It’s been called the DIBS underground, the Cube…” Standing nearby, psych and neuroscience professor Scott Huettel offers, “We could call it the voxel,” a cubic measure often used in MRI studies.

DIBS Director Michael Platt and Associate Director Zab Johnson designed the new space.

The orange walls on the lower level offices don’t go all the way to the ceiling, which helps it feel less underground but may require some new telephone and meeting etiquette, says communication director Julie Rhodes.

“We’re thrilled with it,” said DIBS Associate Director Elizabeth “Zab” Johnson, who co-designed the space with Platt and has already relocated her office from LSRC to the still-unnamed new space.

Researcher Goes to the Dogs, Lands on TV

By Karl Bates

On May 12, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Science Communication & Education

Fresh off a visiting teaching gig at Duke-Kunshan University and a sabbatical in Australia, canine and primate cognition researcher Brian Hare is about to land in your living room.

Hare, an associate professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and founder of Duke’s canine cognition lab and the Triangle startup Dognition.com, is now a television host too.

He’ll be hosting a three-part series on Nat Geo WILD at 10 p.m. ET this Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights called “Is Your Dog a Genius?”

Hare will introduce viewers to some of the latest knowledge about what our dogs think and understand, as well as sharing some at-home games you can use to reveal your dog’s personality. He’ll also visit with some ordinary and extraordinary dogs to see their problem-solving in action.

Friday’s episode is titled ” Doggy See Doggy Do.” Saturday is “Who’s Your Doggy.” And Sunday is “Talk Doggy to Me.”

Bringing a Lot of Energy to Research

By Karl Bates

On May 6, 2015

In Behavior/Psychology, Climate/Global Change, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Mathematics, Nanotech

By Karl Leif Bates

The Duke Energy Initiative‘s annual research collaboration workshop on May 5 was an update on how the campus-wide alliance of more than 130 faculty has been pursuing its goals of making energy “accessible, affordable, reliable and clean.” In short, they’ve been busy!

Energetic discussion swirled around research posters from graduate student projects and Bass Connections. (Photo: Margaret Lillard)

At the afternoon session in Gross Hall, David Mitzi, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, led a panel of five-minute updates on energy materials including engineered microbes, computational modeling of materials, solar cells built on plastic rather than glass, and a nanomaterial-based sheet of material that would combine photovoltaics with storage on a single film.

Kyle Bradbury, managing director of the new Energy Data Analytics Lab that works with the ‘big data’ folks at iiD and the social scientists at SSRI, led a panel on the lab’s latest projects. As smart meters and Internet-enabled appliances enter the market, energy analysts will be flooded with new data, Bradbury explained. There should be great potential to improve efficiency and provide customers with useful real-time feedback, but first the torrent of information has to be corralled and analyzed.

Kyle Bradbury (standing) moderated a data analytics panel with Leslie Collins and Matt Harding (right).

For one example of what big energy data might do, Bradbury and Electrical and Computer Engineering professor Leslie Collins (his former advisor) have done a pilot study to see if computers could be taught to pick out roof-top solar arrays in satellite photos. Nobody actually knows how many arrays there are or how much power they’re producing, Collins said. But without too much fussing around, their first visual search algorithm spotted 92 percent of the arrays correctly in some hand-picked images of California neighborhoods. Ramped up and tweaked, such an automated search could begin to identify just how much residential solar there is, where it is, and roughly how much energy it’s producing.

The third group of researchers, moderated by Energy Initiative associate Daniel Raimi, is working on energy markets and policy, including energy systems modeling and the regulation of green house gasses through the Clean Air Act.

Energy Initiative director Richard Newell said there were 1,400 Duke students enrolled in energy-related courses this year. A first round of six seed-funded research projects was completed and seven new projects have been selected. Eight Bass Connections teams in the energy theme were very productive as well, examining smart grids, solar energy and household energy conservation with teams of undergraduates, graduate students and faculty.