Category: Biology Page 20 of 32

Geography and the Web: A new frontier for data vizualization

On December 3, 2015

In Animals, Biology, Climate/Global Change, Computers/Technology, Data, Environment/Sustainability, Field Research, Visualization

A GIS Day earth cake made by the Collegiate Baker

You might be forgiven if you missed GIS Day at The Levine Science Research Center Nov. 18, but it was your loss. Students and faculty enjoyed a delightful geography-themed afternoon of professional panels, lightning talks, and even a geospatial research-themed cake contest.

What is GIS and why is it important?

Geographic information systems (GIS) give us the power to visualize, question, analyze, and interpret data to understand relationships, patterns, and trends in the world around us. Those who work with data and analytics have a responsibility to contribute to this change by helping us make the right decisions for our future. As noted during ESRI’s 2015 User Conference in the video below, “We have a unique ability to impact and shape the world around us. [Yet] for all of our wisdom, our vast intellectual marvels, we still choose a path of unsustainability and continue to make decisions that negatively impact the Earth and ourselves. […]We must accept our responsibility as stewards of the Earth. […] We must apply our best technology, our best thinking, our best values. Now is the time to act. Now is the time for change.”

How does GIS help?

Doreen Whitley Rogers, Geospatial Information Officer for the National Audubon Society, led a lively discussion about GIS and the World Wide Web at Duke’s GIS Day. She said GIS is essential to understand what is happening in the geographic space around us. As GIS becomes increasingly web-based, efficiently distributing the system to other people is crucial in a time when new data about the environment is being created every second.

3D map displaying the height of buildings that birds hit windows

3D map displaying the height of buildings at which birds fly into windows in Charlotte, NC

Rogers and her team are aiming to move authoritative GIS data to web for visualizations and create a centralized system with the potential to change our culture and transform the world. As the technology manager, she is working on bringing the information to people with proper security and integrity.

In order to get people to use GIS data in a generalized way, Rogers needed to implement several core capabilities to assist those integrating GIS into their workflow. These include socializing GIS as a technology to everybody, creating mobile apps to work with data in real time, and 3D maps such as this one of bird-strikes in downtown Charlotte.

Case Studies

ClimateWatch helps us predict the seasonal behaviour plants and animals.

Mobile apps connecting to the GIS platform promise a strong “return on mission” due to the vast number of people using maps on phones. By mobilizing everyone to use GIS and input data about birds and geography in their area, the platform quickly scales over millions of acres. In the Bahamas, an app allows users to take pictures to support bird protection programs.

ClimateWatch is an app that gives us a better understanding of how bird habitats are affected during temperature and rainfall variations – motivating people to speak up and act towards minimizing anthropogenic climate change. Developed by Earthwatch with the Bureau of Meteorology and The University of Melbourne, the app enables every Australian to be involved in collecting and recording data to help shape the country’s scientific response to climate change.

Virtual simulation of scenic flights as an endangered bird.

Virtual simulation of scenic flights from the perspective of an endangered bird.

Apps such as the 3-D flight map give users the vicarious thrill of cruising through nature landscapes from the view of endangered birds.

With the movements toward cleaning air and water in our communities, our planet’s birds will once again live in healthier habitats. As the Audubon Society likes to say: “Where birds thrive, people prosper.”

For more information about bird-friendly community programs, you can visit Audubon‘s site or send them a message.

Doreen Rogers after her presentation on National GIS day.

To learn more about data visualization in GIS, you can contact Doreen Whitley Rogers via email here.

Post by Anika Radiya-Dixit

Iridescent Beauty: Development, function and evolution of plant nanostructures that influence animal behavior

By Anika Radiya-Dixit

On October 27, 2015

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Field Research, Genetics/Genomics

Iridescent wings of a Morpho butterfly

Creatures like the Morpho butterfly on the leaf above appear to be covered in shimmering blue and green metallic colors. This phenomenon is called “iridescence,” meaning that color appears to change as the angle changes, much like soap bubbles and sea shells.

Iridescent behavior of a soap bubble

In animals, the physical mechanisms and function of structural color have been studied significantly as a signal for recognition or mate choice.

On the other hand, Beverley Glover believes that such shimmering in plants can actually influence animal behavior by attracting pollinators better than their non-iridescent counterparts. Glover,Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, presented her study during the Biology Seminar Series in the French Family Science Center on Monday earlier this week.

Hibiscus Trionum

The metallic property of flowers like the Hibiscus Trionum above are generated by diffraction grating – similar to the way CD shines – to create color from transparent material.

In order to observe the effects of the iridescence on pollinators like bees, Glover created artificial materials with a surface structure of nanoscale ridges, similar to the microscopic view of a petal’s epidermal surface below.

Nanoscale ridges on a petal’s epidermal surface.

In the first set of experiments, Glover and her team marked bees with paint to follow their behavior as they set the insects to explore iridescent flowers. Some were covered in a red grating – containing a sweet solution as a reward – and others with a blue iridescent grating – containing a sour solution as deterrent. The experiment demonstrated that the bees were able to detect the iridescent signal produced by the petal’s nanoridges, and – as a result – correctly identified the rewarding flowers.

Bees pollinating iridescent “flowers”

With the evidence that the bees were able to see iridescence, Glover set out for the second experiment: once the bees find a specific type of flower, how long does it take them to find the same flower in a different location? Using the triangular arrangement of shimmering surfaces as shown below, Glover observed that iridescence produced by a diffraction grating leads to significant increase in foraging speed as compared to non-iridescent flowers.

Triangular formation of iridescent disks used for experimentation on bees

While iridescence in plants is difficult to spot by a casual stroll through the garden, pollinators such as bees definitely can see it, and scientists have recently realized that insect vision and flower colors have co-evolved.

In order to ensure that pollen is transferred between flowers of the same species, these flowers have developed a unique structure of iridescence. As scientists work on understanding which plants produce these beautiful colors and how the nanoscale structure is passed down through reproduction, we can only look at our gardens in wonder at the vast amount of nature that still remains to be explored and learned.

Wonders of nature in an everyday garden

Beverley Glover is the Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden and is currently accepting applications for PhD students.

Post written by Anika Radiya-Dixit

A fireside chat with Marc Jeuland

By Thabit Pulak

On October 6, 2015

In Biology, Climate/Global Change, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Field Research, Global Health, Medicine, Students

Living in Few dorm has its perks, aside from being right beside the bus stop. My faculty-in-residence, Dr. Hwansoo Kim had kindly hosted a reception in his residence, where he invited Dr. Marc Jeuland for a talk about the development of water infrastructure to help improve health. A Chat with Dr. Jeuland
I was immediately captivated when I saw the email invite – as I personally had worked with affordable water filtration, in the developing world, so this was right in my field of interest.

Jeuland is an assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Duke Global Health Institute. He shared his experience working on one of his most recent, major projects, which was of his water infrastructure improvements in Zarqa, Jordan. For a long time, Jordan has been experiencing a water crisis. For the residents of Zarqa, water often has to be purchased from other areas, and then carefully preserved for days, or weeks, and even up to a month. The piped water infrastructure that currently existed in Zarqa was very inefficient, and was a major source of the shortages.

Jeuland, who is an environmental engineer, said that as much as 70 percent of this water can be lost from pipelines as the water reaches the citizens of Zarqa. Jeuland worked to assess inefficiencies within the current water supply systems and tried to design and implement improvements to remedy the faults.

Marc Jeuland is an assisstant professor of global health and public policy

Aside from his work in Zarqa, Jeuland has been involved with countless other projects and studies that have ultimately benefited underserved communities around the world. He has characterized the effects of contaminated groundwater on inhabitants in Rift Valley, Ethiopia and done a detailed analysis of the correlation between water quality and kidney disease in Sri Lanka.

Jeuland’s work shows the real-world applicability of interdisciplinary fields. His work has encompassed the field of not only environmental science, but also behavioral science, economics, and engineering.

For those of you interested in learning more about the interdisciplinary fields of global health and environmental sciences/policy, it would definitely be a great idea to take a look at the classes Jeuland teaches, which include “ENVIRON 538: Global Environmental Health: Economics and Policy” and “GLHLTH 531: Cost Benefit analysis for Health and Environmental Policy”.

It was an honor to get to meet Professor Jeuland. I could tell he was a very busy man. By the time you read this, he is probably off traveling somewhere else in the world, working to improve more lives.

By Thabit Pulak, Class of 2018

Relationship Between Domestication and Human Social Skills

By Madeline Halpert

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

Duke co-hosts THInC: Triangle Health Innovation Challenge

By Anika Ayyar

On September 24, 2015

In Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Business/Economics, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Global Health, Medicine, Science Communication & Education, Students

Blue Devils and Tar Heels may be rivals on the court, but there is little doubt they can be partners in research and innovation.

Participants broke into teams, and spent the weekend working on their solutions.

Last weekend, the Duke School of Medicine Innovation and Entrepreneurship Activity Group and the Carolina Health Entrepreneurship Initiative jointly organized the first ever Triangle Health Innovation Challenge (THInC), a 48-hour ‘hackathon’ that brought together students, clinicians, engineers, and business people from around the Triangle to collaborate on solving problems in healthcare and medicine.

The organizers wanted to tap into the collective knowledge of the Triangle to tackle healthcare problems in novel ways, and to engage individuals who did not necessarily see themselves as healthcare innovators.

“We realized that the Triangle has an immense pool of academic, clinical, and technical talent, but these groups of people rarely interact,” said co-organizer Tanmay Gokhale, an M.D./Ph.D. student in Biomedical engineering at Duke. “We wanted to bring them all into the same room and empower them to make a difference in healthcare.”

Teams had the chance to meet with mentors, who advised them on their ideas and business strategies.

On Friday, the first evening of the event, 127 participants pitched 44 different healthcare problems, proposed 25 solutions, and broke into 15 teams that were, for the most part, interdisciplinary and involved members from across the Triangle.

Many Pratt School of Engineering students, both undergraduate and graduate, participated in the event, and several were members of winning teams.

Each team worked through the weekend, designing and creating a product that delivered on a proposed solution. The projects ranged from evaluating treatment and clinic options for patients through a mobile app, to informing future patients by crowdsourcing opinions and advice from people who had experienced similar medical situations.

Teams, judges, and audience members gathered in the Trent Semans Center for Health Education on Sunday afternoon for the final presentations.

The ingenuity and quality of the solutions that were presented on Sunday afternoon was stunning; each team had drawn from their own firsthand experiences with the shortcomings and challenges of the healthcare system to deliver targeted, nuanced products that tackled meaningful issues.

In a time-cap of three minutes, each team presented the fruits of their weekend of hacking, and were judged not only on their creativity and technical complexity, but also on clinical and business feasibility. Four winners were awarded $13,000 in cash and credits to work with the API (programming interface) of Validic, a Durham company that collects de-identified patient data from medical devices, wearables and apps.

Team Tiba, the winner of the grand prize, created a wearable physical therapy activity tracker to ensure that patients performed their physical therapy exercises regularly and correctly.

Team Breeze, winner of the runner-up prize, presented a smart lung function trainer and app to encourage pursed-lip breathing exercises in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Team Leia, the winners of the Mosaic Health Solutions prize, developed a digital to-do list for physicians, which integrated intimately with stores of data in order to send live push notifications about patient updates and prioritize different actions for different studies. The team hoped to improve

Team Tiba, winners of the Grand Prize and the Validic mHealth Prize, pose after the awards ceremony.

patient and physician satisfaction as well as patient safety, by assuring that doctors were up to date on conditions and constantly in sync with changes and improvements. Their prototype piggybacked off of current medical APIs, and queried existing data, making it easy for the roughly 150,000 clinicians who already store their data online to easily transition to the app.

Given the immense success of THInC, the organizers said they’re already planning to do it again next year. They’d like to recruit more students as well as more professional developers and programmers so that more teams could come away with a functioning prototype of their solution.

For any questions regarding the event, or planning, promoting, or executing next year’s event, please contact info@thincweekend.org. Interested individuals can also join the Health 2.0 NC Triangle group to participate in other similar events and meet similarly minded people in the area – all are welcome!

Post By Anika Ayyar

Fisticuffs Among the Mantis Shrimp

By Karl Bates

On September 23, 2015

In Animals, Biology, Students

When mantis shrimp (Stomatopoda) dispute territory or mating rights, they use the tools at hand – namely two super-sonic bludgeons powerful enough to dismember a live crab or break through a clam shell.

Mantis shrimp are pugnacious pugilistic crustaceans . (Photo by Nazir Amin via Wikimedia Commons.)

Mantis shrimp are pugnacious and pugilistic. (Photo by Nazir Amin via Wikimedia Commons.)

Fortunately, they’ve developed a way to use these deadly clubs on each other without causing too many fatalities. In a ritualized battle called “telson sparring,” the combatants take turns hammering on each other’s tail-plate, which is raised up like a shield.

Graduate student Patrick Green watched more than 30 such contests in captive Panamanian mantis shrimp to discover that it wasn’t the shrimp who hit hardest who won the bout, but the one who hit the most frequently.

Green and his Ph.D. supervisor, biology professor Sheila Patek, hypothesize that the ritualized fighting could be a display of overall vigor and tenacity rather than outright punching power.

CITATION: “Contests with deadly weapons: telson sparring in mantis shrimp (Stomatopoda),” Green PA, Patek SN. Biology Letters, Sept. 2015. DOI:10.1098/rsbl.2015.0558

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

Post by Karl Leif Bates, Director of Research Communications

Uneasy Lies the Gut That Wears the Crown

By Karl Bates

On August 20, 2015

In Animals, Biology, Field Research, Global Health, Students

Meerkats of the Kalahari Desert are social, and wormy. (all photos by Ed Kabay)

Meerkats of the Kalahari Desert are social, and wormy. (Photo by Ed Kabay)

The dominant matriarchs of meerkat society carry a heavy burden.

Not only are these females stressed from having to constantly scold and cajole the rowdy members of the tribe to maintain their perch as the primary breeders and enforcers of the clan, they apparently host more parasites as well.

In a two-year study at the Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert, Duke graduate student Kendra Smyth sampled the parasite diversity of 83 sexually mature meerkats living in 18 social groups.

Specifically, she gathered 97 freshly deposited poops for later analysis. Such is the glamour of graduate student field work.

After diluting and spinning, the samples were microscopically analyzed for careful counting of the eggs of six species of intestinal worms.

What Smyth found in the end was consistent with similar studies done in male-dominant societies: The boss is more heavily parasitized.

So, why is that? Well, it might be that the matriarch’s stressful job takes some resources away from her immune defenses, or it may be that her close contact with more members of the tribe puts her at greater risk of picking up worms from others.

Meerkats, and graduate students like Kendra Smyth, are often seen scanning the horizon. (Photo by Ed Kabay)

The bottom line is that the meerkat model of sexual selection carries a cost, which, as in other species, is more heavily borne by the breeders.

Smyth’s findings appeared online this month in Behavioral Ecology and are a part of her dissertation research on immune function in meerkats. In addition to poop, she’s sampling blood and looking at hormone levels and other variables.

“Parasites are a proxy for measuring the immune system,” said Smyth, who is a fourth-year grad student with Christine Drea of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Program in Ecology.

And wild-living meerkats can be a kind of proxy for humans. “Most of what we know about the immune system comes from laboratory mice living in unrealistic conditions,” Smyth said. “They’re housed singly in clean cages and they’re parasite-free. I’m not convinced that that’s how the immune system works when you put them in the natural world.”

“For any kind of species living in groups, like humans, it’s important to understand the dynamics of the spread of disease and which individuals might be susceptible,” she said.

During one meerkat weigh-in, this practical joker put his thumb on the scale. (Photo by Kendra Smyth)

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (IOS-1021633) and a dissertation travel grant from the Duke Graduate School. Research at the Kuruman River Reserve is supported by the European Research Council (294494), Cambridge, Duke and Zurich Universities.

Post by Karl Leif Bates

Marine Lab Hosts 500+ at Open House

By Robin Smith

On August 4, 2015

In Animals, Biology, Climate/Global Change, Environment/Sustainability, Field Research, Guest Post

In what was a record high turnout, more than 500 people made their way to Pivers Island on Saturday Aug. 1, for the Duke University Marine Lab’s annual open house. Visitors listened to whales, peered at plankton and sea urchin larvae through microscopes, and learned how salinity gradients and wind can drive ocean currents at 16 research stations scattered throughout the campus. Kids of all ages also got to meet horse conchs, pen shell clams, tulip snails, fiddler crabs, slipper snails and other creatures in the marine lab’s touch tanks. “We don’t think of snails as having teeth but they really do; that radula is quite a weapon. It’s like a cross between a chainsaw and a tongue,” said Duke visiting professor Jim Welch. Photos by Amy Chapman-Braun, Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke.

Pinpointing the Cause of Coughs and Sneezes

By Robin Smith

On July 30, 2015

In Biology, Data, Genetics/Genomics, Medicine, Statistics, Students

Duke students are trying to help doctors find a faster way to pinpoint the cause of their patients’ coughs, sore throats and sniffles.

The goal is to better determine if and when to give antibiotics in order to stem the rise of drug-resistant superbugs, said senior Kelsey Sumner.

For ten weeks this summer, Sumner and fellow Duke student Christopher Hong teamed up with researchers at Duke Medicine to identify blood markers that could be used to tell whether what’s making someone sick is a bacteria, or a virus.

More than half of children who go to the doctor for a sore throat, ear infection, bronchitis or other respiratory illness leave with a prescription for antibiotics, even though the majority of these infections — more than 70% — turn out to be caused by viruses, which antibiotics can’t kill.

The end result is that antibiotics are prescribed roughly twice as often as they should be, to the tune of 11.4 million unnecessary prescriptions a year.

“It’s a big problem,” said Emily Ray Ko, MD, PhD, a physician at Duke Regional Hospital who worked with Sumner and Hong on the project, alongside biostatistician Ashlee Valente and infectious disease researcher Ephraim Tsalik of Duke’s Center for Applied Genomics and Precision Medicine.

Prescribing antibiotics when they aren’t needed can make other infections trickier to treat.

Fast, accurate genetic tests may soon help doctors tell if you really need antibiotics. Photo from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That’s because antibiotics wipe out susceptible bacteria, but a few bacteria that are naturally resistant to the drugs survive, which allows them to multiply without other bacteria to keep them in check.

More than two million people develop drug-resistant bacterial infections each year.

A single superbug known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, kills more Americans every year than emphysema, HIV/ AIDS, Parkinson’s disease and homicide combined.

Using antibiotics only when necessary can help, Ko said, but doctors need a quick and easy test that can be performed while the patient is still in the clinic or the emergency room.

“Most doctors need to know within an hour or two whether someone should get antibiotics or not,” Ko said. “Delaying treatment in someone with a bacterial infection could have serious and potentially life threatening consequences, which is one of the main reasons why antibiotics are over-prescribed.”

With help from Sumner and Hong, the team has identified differences in patients’ bloodwork they hope could eventually be detected within a few hours, whereas current tests can take days.

The researchers made use of the fact that bacteria and viruses trigger different responses in the immune system.

They focused on the genetic signature generated by tiny snippets of genetic material called microRNAs, or miRNAs, which play a role in controlling the activity of other genes within the cell.

Using blood samples from 31 people, ten with bacterial pneumonia and 21 with flu virus, they used a technique called RNA sequencing to compare miRNA levels in bacterial versus viral infections.

So far, the researchers have identified several snippets of miRNA that differ between bacterial and viral infections, and could be used to discriminate between the two.

“Hopefully it could be used for a blood test,” Sumner said.

“One goal of these types of assays could be to identify infections before symptoms even appear,” Ko said. “Think early detection of viral infections like Ebola, for example, where it would be helpful to screen people so you know who to quarantine.”

Sumner and Hong were among 40 students selected for a summer research program at Duke called Data+. They presented their work at the Data+ Final Symposium on July 23 in Gross Hall.

Data+ is sponsored by the Information Initiative at Duke, the Social Sciences Research Institute and Bass Connections. Additional funding was provided by the National Science Foundation via a grant to the departments of mathematics and statistical science.

Writing by Robin Smith; photos and video by Christine Delp and Hannah McCracken

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