Category: Biology Page 19 of 32

A Dead Parrot? Not Yet. But It Could Sure Use Your Help

On February 15, 2016

An international team of gene sequencing scientists, including some at Duke, want to sequence the genomes of all living kakapo — a critically endangered flightless parrot of New Zealand – while there are still 125 of them left in the world.

A one-year-old Kakapo named Pura on Codfish Island in 2005, by Mnolf, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the first project aiming to sequence every member of a given species. The scientists and their collaborators are hoping the public can help through a crowd-funding effort. They hope to raise $45,000 US and are a little more than halfway there. With just 2 and a half months left, you can help write the end to this story.

Four years ago, Duke research specialist Jason Howard picked up a children’s book from the library to read to his 6-year-old daughter. It was about the kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), a flightless, nocturnal parrot that smells like honey.

Howard works in the Duke lab of neurobiologist Erich Jarvis, a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator who is co-leading a massive, ongoing effort to sequence the genomes of all 10,000 bird species. So, Howard’s library book pick was not exactly random. (In fact, he was sequencing the parakeet genome at the time.)

This sweet face belongs to Felix the Kakapo, photographed in 2006 by Brent Barrett (originally posted to Flikr – via Wikimedia Commons)

But as Howard read about efforts to save this beloved — and rapidly aging — bird population, he asked his daughter whether she thought he should make the kakapo’s genome a priority. (To which she said, “Yes, daddy, do it!”)

Howard was able to obtain a DNA sample from the kakapo, a feat in itself, and get a rough draft of the sequence. “But the sequencing technology [three years ago] wasn’t as good then and it was a lot more expensive,” he said.

He wanted to get a higher quality genome and study genomes of individuals, in part because there are so few kakapo left. Because this bird is among the most ancient species of parrot, it would also give Jarvis’s lab a better understanding of the evolution of vocal learning and speech imitation, where many of their studies focus.

Advances in genome sequencing even in the past year have already answered the group’s wish for a more-detailed kakapo genome. Jarvis’s lab completed the genome of a kakapo named Jane; their so-called ‘reference’ genome will allow them to more simply and inexpensively piece together the sequences of other individual kakapo. They just needed the funds to do more.

As luck would have it, molecular ecologist Bruce Robertson, an associate professor at the University of Otago, Andrew Digby of the New Zealand Department of Conservation and David Iorns of the Genetic Rescue Foundation approached Howard, while he was working on Jane’s genome, about funding and crowdsourcing a project to sequence all of the remaining kakapo. “I had never dreamed of doing all 125,” Howard said.

Jason Howard

Conservation efforts that started in the 1980s have already employed breeding strategies to boost dwindling population, but with individual genomes in hand, the group will be able to understand which kakapo harbor genetic susceptibility to specific diseases and to more effectively breed them to produce offspring with more robust immune systems. (One day, scientists might even be able to modify disease-vulnerable genes using gene-editing technology.) The genomes will also allow them to investigate any genetic causes of low fertility in these birds, which mate only intermittently.

Kakapo currently reside in the wild on just two of New Zealand’s small islands, because human-introduced predators, including cats and dogs, ran them off the mainland.

Kakapo Recovery has access to museum samples of deceased birds from areas where they are now extinct, including some from nearly 200 years ago. If the project is well-funded, they can tap into these museum specimens to get a better understanding of the various island populations and possible clues about their demise.

As of February 15, the team’s crowdfunding effort has reached more than 150 backers, but they would like to see more make a donation. To learn more about kakapo, check out Kakapo Recovery and Genetic Rescue Foundation.

Please stick around and watch a male Kakapo named Scirocco acting inappropriately as Stephen Fry narrates. (BBC-TV)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY]

KellyRae_Chi_100 Post by Kelly Rae Chi

Charles Darwin Artifacts You Can Find at Duke

By Robin Smith

On February 12, 2016

In Biology, Science Communication & Education

In this letter written nearly 150 years ago, Charles Darwin asks whether nest-building is something birds instinctively know how to do from birth, or whether it’s a skill they get better at with practice — a question researchers continue to study today.

Hidden among more than four million books and documents stacked three stories high, in a room kept a constant 50 degrees with 30 percent humidity, Duke’s Rubenstein Library houses several letters and early edition publications by one of history’s greatest scientists — the British naturalist Charles Darwin.

Born more than 200 years ago today, Darwin famously wrote thousands of letters in his lifetime. You can find several of the handwritten originals at Duke, on topics ranging from how birds moult to the behavior of blow flies.

“I begin to think that the pairing of birds must be as delicate and tedious an operation as the pairing of young gentlemen and ladies,” a 59-year-old Darwin wrote to his bird-loving friend and frequent correspondent John Jenner Weir on April 18, 1868.

Also available is an 1855 copy of Darwin’s firsthand account of the voyage of the Beagle. These and other Darwin writings are available by request at http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/.

Visitors to Duke’s Rubenstein Library can browse an 1855 copy of Darwin’s firsthand account of the voyage of the Beagle, “Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World, Under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N.”

Post by Robin A. Smith Robin Smith

When the Data Get Tough, These Researchers Go Visual

By Karl Bates

On February 10, 2016

In Art, Biology, Field Research, Science Communication & Education, Statistics, Visualization

Ever wondered what a cleaner shrimp can see?

Or how the force of a footstep moves from particle to particle through a layer of sand?

How about what portion of our renewable energy comes from wind versus solar power?

The winning submission, created by Nicholas School PhD candidate Brandon Morrison, illustrates the flow of agricultural and forestry crops from raw materials to consumer products. The colors correspond to the type of crop – brown for wood, green for vegetables, etc. – and the width of the lines correspond to the quantity of the crop. You can check out the full image and caption on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.

The answers to these questions and more are stunningly rendered in the entries to the 2016 Student Data Visualization Contest, which you can check out now on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.

“Visualizations take advantage of our powerful ability to detect and process shapes to reveal detailed trends that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see,” said Angela Zoss, Data Visualization Coordinator at Duke Data and Visualization Services (DVS), who runs the contest. “This year’s winners were all able to take very complex topics and use visualization to make them more accessible.”

One winner and two finalists were selected from the 14 submissions on the basis of five criteria: insightfulness, broad appeal, aesthetics, technical merit, and novelty. The submissions represent data from all areas of research at Duke – from politics and health to fundamental physics and biology.

“This year’s entrants showed a lot of sophistication and advanced scholarship,” Zoss said. “We’re seeing more advanced graduate work and multi-year research projects that are really benefiting from visualization.”

Eric Monson, a Data Visualization Analyst with DVS, hopes the contest will inspire more students to consider data visualization when grappling with intricate data sets.

“A lot of this work only gets shared within courses or small academic communities, so it’s exciting to give people this opportunity to have their work reach a broader audience,” Monson said.

Posters of the winning submissions will soon be on display in the Brandaleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services in The Edge on the first floor of Bostock Library.

The second-place entry, by Art History PhD student Katherine McCusker, depicts an archaeological site in Viterbo, Italy. The colored lines indicate the likely locations of buried structures like walls, platforms, and pavement, based on an interpretation of data from ground-penetrating radar (represented by a dark red, yellow, white colormap). You can check out the full image and caption on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.

Kara J. Manke, PhD

Post by Kara Manke

Pace of Aging Story Makes Top Ten

By Karl Bates

On January 11, 2016

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Field Research, Genetics/Genomics, Guest Post

A study led by Center for Child and Family faculty fellows Daniel Belsky and Terrie Moffitt which found that some people grow old significantly faster than others, was named the No. 4 news story of 2015 by Science News.

The paper, published the week of July 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared a panel of 18 biological measures that may be combined to determine whether people are aging faster or slower than their peers.

Dan Belsky

The data comes from the Dunedin Study, a landmark longitudinal study that has tracked more than a thousand people born in the same town between 1972-73. Health measures like blood pressure and liver function have been taken regularly, along with interviews and other assessments.

“We set out to measure aging in these relatively young people,” said first author Belsky, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine. “Most studies of aging look at seniors, but if we want to be able to prevent age-related disease, we’re going to have to start studying aging in young people.”

Belsky said the progress of aging shows in human organs just as it does in eyes, joints and hair, but sooner. So, as part of their regular reassessment of the study population at age 38 in 2011, the team measured the functions of kidneys, liver, lungs, metabolic and immune systems. They also measured HDL cholesterol, cardiorespiratory fitness and the length of the telomeres—protective caps at the end of chromosomes that have been found to shorten with age.

Based on a subset of these biomarkers, the research team set a “biological age” for each participant, which ranged from under 30 to nearly 60 in the 38-year-olds.

According to Science News, “The finding tapped into a mystery that has long captivated scientists and the public alike…”

Measuring the Mechanical Forces of Disease

By Karl Bates

On January 5, 2016

In Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Cancer, Cardiology, Guest Post, Physics

“All these complicated diseases that we don’t have a good handle on — they all have this mechanical component. Well why is that?”

Brent Hoffman is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering

This is exactly the question Brent Hoffman, Duke biomedical engineering assistant professor, is helping answer. Many of the common diseases that we fear have a mechanical component. In asthma attacks, a chemical or physical stimulus causes the air channels in the lung to shut as the muscles that control the width of the channel contract– the mechanical component.

Another example is atherosclerosis, commonly known as the hardening of the arteries, the leading killer in developed countries. Instead of air flow, blood flow is affected as the walls of the blood vessels get thicker. Factors such as smoking, being overweight, and having high cholesterol increase the chance of getting this disease. However, examining the mechanical portion, the plaques associated with atherosclerosis tend to occur at certain parts of the blood vessels, where they branch or curve. You can think of it like a hose. When you kink a hose or put your thumb over the nozzle, the fluid flows in a different way. Hoffman said there are similar stories concerning mechanical portions of major diseases, such as muscular dystrophy and breast cancer.

Hoffman’s lab is building tension sensors to measure forces during collective cell migration.

This all sounds very biological, so why is he in the engineering department? As mechanobiology is a new field, there are few tools available for reporting a protein’s shape or its forces inside living cells. Hoffman makes the tools enabling the study of mechanobiology. During Hoffman’s postdoctoral research, he worked on recording forces across proteins in living cells, their natural environment. Now, he’s expanding that technology and using it to do basic science studies to understand mechanobiology.

Hoffman said he hadn’t planned this. From high school, he knew he wanted to be an engineer. As an undergraduate, Hoffman interned at IBM, where he worked on the production of chip carriers using copper-plating. Hoffman was able to apply knowledge, such as changing pH to get various amounts of copper, and make everything perform at optimal performance, but he wanted to know more about the processes.

So he set out to get his Ph.D in process control, which involves deciding how to set all the numbers and dials on the equipment, how large the tank should be, what pressure and temperature should be used, etc. in chemical plants. Hoffman was set on the path to become a chemical engineer. However, during the first week of graduate school, he attended a biophysics talk, in which he understood very little. Biophysics interested Hoffman, so he went from intending to do research on one of the most applied engineering projects on campus to arguably one of the least applied in a week. This was the beginning of his biophysics journey. However, as his Ph. D was much more heavily interested in the physics aspect, Hoffman chose to do his postdoc in cell biology to balance his training. Mixing everything together, he got biomedical engineering.

Hoffman reflects that his decisions were logical, but he had not planned to take the route he did. Hoffman cautions that it is better to have a plan than not because if you do not plan, you won’t know where you are going. However, he advises that since a person learns more about likes and dislikes as one proceeds on their route, students should not be afraid to incorporate what they learn into their plans.

Hoffman’s journey is characterized by finding and doing what he enjoyed. Trained in both the worlds of physics and biology, but never intending to pursue a future in either, Hoffman is uniquely suited for his current position in the revolutionary emerging field of mechanobiology. He is able to put his biology hat on and his physicist hat on for a bit, while the engineer in him is thinking, “is any of this practical?”
“If you had to pick out the key to my success, it would be doing that,” Hoffman said.

Guest Post by Amanda Li, a senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Math

Middle Schoolers Ask: What's it Like to be a Scientist?

By Robin Smith

On December 16, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Environment/Sustainability, Physics, Science Communication & Education, Students

When a group of local middle schoolers asked four Duke postdocs what it’s like to be a scientist, the answers they got surprised them.

For toxicologist Laura Maurer, it means finding out if the tiny silver particles used to keep socks and running shirts from getting smelly might be harmful to your health.

For physics researcher Andres Aragoneses, it means using lasers to stop hackers and make telecommunications more secure.

And for evolutionary anthropologist Noah Snyder-Mackler, it means handling a lot of monkey poop.

The end result is a series of short video interviews filmed and edited by 5th-8th graders in Durham, North Carolina. Read more about the project and the people behind it at http://sites.duke.edu/pdocs/, or watch the videos below:

Five Duke Papers Crack the Altmetric 100

By Karl Bates

On December 14, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Medicine

The numbers are in, and five papers with Duke authors cracked the Top 100 Altmetric scores for 2015.

Example of an Altmetric analysis.

Yeah, it all seems a little gimmicky and meta, but the scores can be useful. Altmetric (to which Duke has an institutional membership) combines multiple counts of news stories, social media chatter and professional citations on an academic paper to give it a single score. Obviously, the system’s greatest strength is comparing this to other Altmetric scores, but it’s actually a lot of fun.

Duke’s biggest score – a very impressive Altmetric 2294 – came in at #5 on the list. “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” attracted a lot of attention in Science, spawning 74 news stories and nearly 2,000 tweets. Postdoctoral researcher Nina Strohminger of the Kenan Institute for Ethics is one of the authors from 125 institutions on the paper that suggests psychology has some housekeeping to do.

At number 28 with an Altmetric of 1,279, came “Global, regional and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 301 acute and chronic diseases and injuries in 188 countries, 1990-2013 (here comes the colon!): a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013.” This Lancet paper, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is every bit as massive and important as its title. Among its thousands of authors is our own Terrie Moffitt. It garnered 39 news stories and 1400 tweets and has already been incorporated into nine Wikipedia entries.

A companion paper with another big title for another big study, “Global, regional, and national age-sex specific all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 240 causes of death, 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013,” came in at #36 on the list with an Altmetric of 1180. Its authors might be jealous of #28, but it’s mostly the same folks! Eighty people saw fit to post this one on Facebook and 60 on Google+.

Two papers out of the now-defunct NSF think-tank the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) rounded out our top 100 at #72 and #87.

What are the largest ocean giants?

Craig McClain of NESCent and Duke Biology led “Sizing Ocean Giants,” an analysis that tries to get the right dimensions on a bunch of intimidating ocean creatures including the giant clam and the colossal squid (which turns out to be only a third the size of the less impressively named giant squid). The paper’s Altmetric of 954 was led by 24 news stories, 24 blog posts and almost 900 tweets. McClain also leads a very popular marine science blog “Deep Sea News” which probably aided the story’s social presence.

Number 87 was “Synthesis of phylogeny and taxonomy into a comprehensive tree of life,” which included Karen Cranston of NESCent and Duke Biology. This hugely ambitious effort to draw a tree of life for the whole planet at once earned an Altmetric of 895 by garnering 21 news stories, 12 blogs and nearly 900 tweets. And it too has been incorporated into Wikimedia – once so far.

It’s a brave new world out there in academic publishing.

Post by Karl Leif Bates

Dam Good Research on Invasive Beavers in Patagonia

By Devin Nieusma

On December 11, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Environment/Sustainability, Field Research

Alejandro Pietrek and a subject of his research. Photo by Duke Forward.

For three years, Duke student Alejandro Pietrek has bravely grappled with some unusual marauders of the forests and steppes of Patagonia: invasive beavers. A biology graduate student, Pietrek recently presented his dissertation on the “Demography of invasive beavers in the heterogeneous landscapes of Patagonia.” Pietrek has studied over two dozen colonies of beavers in order to answer three questions:

“How do differences between habitats affect the demography of invaders?”
“How does density dependence affect the abundance and distribution of invaders post-establishment?”
“How can we manage biological invasions?”

Pietrek began by explaining how the furry rodents started ravaging the natural habitat of Patagonia, beginning with 20 beavers intentionally introduced into the forests of Tierra del Fuego in 1946. By the late 1960s, the growing colonies spread to the continent.

Today there are an estimated 100,000 individuals in Patagonia, disrupting the regional habitats and destroying biodiversity.

The biologist tackled his first question via quantitative science. “Very simply mathematical models have shown that speed of invasion is determined by two main things: population growth rate and movement,” he said. How the different habitats of Patagonia affected this invasion was what he worked to find out, by measuring colony size and the number of kits. Pietrek directly observed 25 colonies in each habitat over three years, using binoculars and seemingly endless patience. “It was very fun,” he said. He found that steppe habitats tended to have higher numbers of beavers and kits compared to forest.

Beaver Dam – Tierra del Fuego National Park, Argentina – Photograph by Anne Dirkse via Wikimedia Commons

Pietrek believed that the answer to the first question was counterintuitive, and he explored the possible reason in the second, where he figured the cause to be density dependence, as beavers in the steppe were more likely to survive in higher populations, and thus were dependent on living in large colonies for survival. In the forest, colony size wasn’t as important to the survival of the beavers. Pietrek found that as population density increased, the animals’ choice of landform changed: with denser numbers, the beavers were more likely to choose u-shaped valleys and plains than canyons. He noted the importance of identifying the preferred habitat of beavers, as it may allow easier detection of the presence of the invasive species.

Finally, Pietrek applied his findings toward the management of biological invasions. “One thing we can do is to build a model to predict the spread of beavers,” he said. He observed that beavers spread on average 7.8 km per year, though he also used individual-based models as well in order to track juvenile beavers. He found that young beavers tended to disperse and form new colonies, and formed another model in order to track this dispersal pattern. Juvenile beavers will first search for mates within their original colonies, only moving along if none can be found. These findings make for easier tracking of beavers across the landscape, allowing for easier management of their population growth.

Post by Devin Nieusma, Duke 2019

Seeing the Research for the Trees

By Karl Bates

On December 9, 2015

In Biology, Climate/Global Change, Environment/Sustainability, Field Research, Students

The Duke Forest is more than just a place to run the trails or harvest timber. It’s also an important living laboratory for Duke’s research community.

On Dec. 4, we joined the annual tour of research sites in the 7,000-acre forest, led by forest Director Sara Childs and Operations Manager Jenna Schreiber. Nearly two dozen of us learned about water and bugs, climate change and nanoparticle pollution.

Maggie Zimmer opened up the equipment box for her show and tell of the hydrology experiment.

At the first stop, in the Edeburn Division south of Hillsborough, Nicholas School graduate student Maggie Zimmer showed us a densely instrumented watershed for studying how a raindrop reaches a stream. A little valley of 130 hectares is studded with wells and dammed by a weir that measures every drop flowing out of the watershed. Zimmer and her thesis advisor Brian McGlynn are trying to get a handle on how a drop of water falling on a leaf or the ground eventually makes its way through several feet of soil and clay, in and around chunks of old rock, to the stream.

It’s not as simple as you think, says Zimmer, who has hand-augured 35 test wells in the study area and spent many dark, wet nights tending to her delicate equipment. For example, the rain gauge measures .01 millimeters at a time!

Across the road from the hydrology lab, we visited a global warming forest built by Jim Clark’s research team and overseen by lab manager Jordan Siminitz.

Jordan Siminitz showed us inside one of the warming forest test chambers.

There are 24 plastic enclosures for studying how temperature increases in the soil might affect the growth of young trees. The warming scenarios were produced by a network of propane-heated pipes under the soil in each enclosure. The funding that built the site and operated it for four years has stopped, but the trees are still there and the team is hopeful they can restart the experiment.

Here and in Harvard Forest, the team was looking at soil temperature increases of 3 degrees or 5 degrees Celsius. The surprising finding out of four years of data was that southern tree species seemed to be more adversely affected by the temperature increase than northern species.

“Long term research like this is really hard to get funding for,” Childs said. But without long term studies, we won’t know much about what to expect from climate change. Incidentally, NC State was conducting a parallel study of ants and warmer soils in the same experimental booths, but they’ll be shutting down this year as well.

Duke Forest Director Sara Childs checked out a pickled Southern Pine Beetle.

At the next stop, we found nattily uniformed NC Forest Service ranger Philip Ramsey standing next to an elaborate plastic contraption like 10 black funnels in a series leading down to a reservoir of antifreeze at the bottom. It’s a pheromone trap for the Southern Pine Beetle and its predator, the Clerid beetle. All is well with those bugs for now, but the devastating enemy of ash trees, the Emerald Ash Borer, is on the march and due to arrive any month now, Ramsey said, passing around pickled specimens of the bugs for our inspection.

Our last stop was an update on the nanotechnology test site called the mesocosm facility – 30 boxes filled with water, silt and plant life. They’re meant to mimic a tiny slice of a shoreline ecosystem to see how various nanoparticle materials are taken up by plant and animal life.

Steve Anderson (at right) explained the mesocosm test chambers to the tour group.

Research analyst Steve Anderson from Emily Bernhardt’s lab explained the latest experiments on what happens to all the poisonous stuff infused into anti-bacterial socks and pressure-treated lumber. The good news so far is that nanoparticies don’t seem to get taken up by ecosystems as readily as some had feared.

This isn’t really forest research per se, but where else are you going to put 30 big bunkers of mud, surrounded by an electrified raccoon fence, a super-fine frog fence and a Quonset hut enclosure for the cooler months?

Duke Forest houses 71 research projects at the moment, 16 of them started in just the last year. We’ll look forward to more fun discoveries on next year’s tour!

Follow Duke Forest on Facebook or subscribe to their updates to catch this and other tours.

Post by Karl Leif Bates

Science a waste of money? “Wastebook” misses big picture

By Robin Smith

On December 7, 2015

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

Duke biologist Sheila Patek explains the big picture behind a recent study on sparring mantis shrimp. Photograph by Roy Caldwell.

Sheep in microgravity. An experiment involving a monkey in a hamster ball on treadmill. These are among more than 100 descriptions of what Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, deems wasteful federal spending in “Wastebook: The Farce Awakens,” released on Tuesday, Dec. 8. The latest in a series originally launched by retired Senator Tom Coburn, each “Wastebook” targets a range of federally-funded projects, many of them science-related, which the authors declare a waste of taxpayers’ money.

But what do the researchers behind these projects have to say? We asked Duke biologist Sheila Patek, whose work on fighting mantis shrimp was singled out in Flake’s latest report, to tell us her side of the story:

“What do we stand to learn from basic research on mantis shrimp? It turns out, a lot,” Patek said.

“First, mantis shrimp strike with weapons operating at the same acceleration as a bullet in the muzzle of a gun, yet they achieve high performance without explosive materials. They use a system based on muscles, springs and latches and neutralize their opponents with impact-resistant armor. This research helps us understand how animals survive when they have lethal weapons at their disposal but do not actually kill the opponent — something that could change the way we look at future defense systems,” Patek said.

“Second, these crustaceans have properties of extreme acceleration that are of great interest to military and manufacturing engineers. Mantis shrimp use a toothpick-sized hammer that can break snail shells in water that humans can only break with a larger hammer in air. Their small, lightweight hammer resists fracture over thousands of uses. Our research has already led to the development of novel engineered materials that resist impact fracture, based directly on mantis shrimp hammers,” Patek said.

“Third, mantis shrimp do something else that humans cannot: strike in water at the speed of cars on a major highway without causing cavitation, a phenomenon that occurs in systems with rapid motion (like propellers) where implosive bubbles emit heat, light and sound with energy sufficient to wear away steel. Naval engineers have been trying to solve this problem since the invention of the submarine. When we understand how mantis shrimp avoid cavitation during the rotation phase of their strikes while effectively using cavitation during their impact phase, the knowledge will undoubtedly improve the capabilities of ships, submarines, torpedoes and other machines,” Patek said.

“Research that helps us understand and apply the mechanics and evolutionary diversity of natural systems to create a better and safer society for all of us is a wise investment for this country.”

Post by Robin A. Smith, Senior Science Writer