Category: Lecture Page 13 of 20

Cooking up a new approach to heart disease in rural China

On March 24, 2014

In Cardiology, Field Research, Global Health, Lecture, Medicine

By Ashley Mooney

As cardiovascular disease becomes more prevalent in China, researchers look to change cooking practices that may be putting people at higher risk.

Currently, the top two causes of death in China are cardiovascular disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, meaning that cardiovascular interventions will become increasingly important in public health, Assistant McGill University professor Jill Baumgartner said in a March 21 lecture. Environmental pollution from industry, increasing vehicle pollution, tobacco smoke and biomass usage have contributed to China’s shift in disease burden.

Typical gasifiers in China. Slide created by , photo taken by Ashley Mooney.

Typical gasifiers in China. Slide created by Jill Baumgartner, photo taken by Ashley Mooney.

“There’s been massive changes in China since the 1970s, they’ve brought in economic and social reforms. You see these massive increases in [gross domestic product] per capita as well as life expectancy,” she said. “[As a result], there’s been this shift from nutritional or infectious disease-related deaths in China… to chronic diseases.”

Many across the globe use gasifier stoves to cook, which use wood or coal as fuel and emit more carbon monoxide than electric alternatives. These emissions are not only harmful to the environment, but chronic exposure can lead to an increase in systolic blood pressure—a marker for increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

“Globally, about half the world’s population is using biomass and coal as their primary energy source,” Baumgartner said. “In China it’s just under 50 percent of the population.”

Baumgartner primarily studied women who have never smoked cigarettes in Yunnan, a southern province of China. Culturally, women from this area rarely smoke, while men often do, she said. The women are also the primary cooks for the family, meaning they spend the most time near biomass-burning stoves and space heaters and are ideal study subjects for the effects of the biomass without the confounds of smoking.

By measuring particulate matter, black carbon and water-soluble organic carbon, Baumgartner determined women’s seasonal exposure to biomass and its effect on their blood pressure. Black carbon is associated with regional climate warming and is used as an indicator of combustion particulate matter and water-soluble organic carbon is an indicator of biomass particulate matter.

“When we think about climate change and other greenhouse gasses, the effects are going to be really long term,” Baumgartner said. “But black carbon is unique because if you turn off black carbon, it’s kind of like turning off the tap. So you stop black carbon from entering the atmosphere and the warming effect decreases in weeks.”

While Baumgartner’s research initially looked at only the effects of biomass burning on cardiovascular health, she is transitioning to work on interventions. Since the beginning of her work in Yunnan, engineers have built a biomass-pellet manufacturing site, which provides more efficient and less toxic fuel for locals.

Baumgartner said interventions leading to a 8mm Hg decrease in systolic blood pressure could translate to a 29 percent decrease in coronary heart disease and 38 percent decrease in the onset of strokes.

Managing a Lab: The Parts You Won't Learn in Class

By Erin Weeks

On March 14, 2014

In Faculty, Lecture, Science Communication & Education, Students

Panelists (L-R) Sally Kornbluth, Jessica Monserrate, Mohamed Noor and Susan Smith (Photo: David Steinbrenner)

By Erin Weeks

For many researchers in training, making it as a scientist involves the dream of one day running their own lab. But becoming the head of a laboratory takes far more than research chops — you’ve got to have serious people skills, too.

A March 13 panel called “Managing a Lab: Insights from Academia and Industry” advised an auditorium of Duke postdocs and PhD students on how to meet the management challenges they may face one day as principal investigators (PI). “Effective lab management can be as crucial to career success as the research itself,” the description for the session read.

Sally Kornbluth, Vice Dean for Basic Sciences at Duke Medicine and Duke’s provost-elect, drew from her own experience as a PI as she walked the audience through the nitty-gritty of building a lab from the ground up.

“The lab takes on the style of the PI,” she said. The job of the lab head is to set its scientific direction, obtain grant money and hire the right people.

PIs have to make decisions about what kind of leader they want to be — how accessible do they want to be? How will they motivate their lab members? How will they deal with difficult personnel situations? Some of these questions will be determined by the lead scientist’s personality, Kornbluth said, but others may require trial and error to figure out.

The panel, put on by the Office of Postdoctoral Services, included three other lab managers representing both academia and industry: Mohamed Noor, professor and chair of the biology department; Jessica Monserrate, a scientist at Bayer CropScience and former Duke postdoc; and Susan Smith, a scientific investigator at Stiefel and also former Duke and Duke Med postdoc.

The speakers fielded questions reflecting anxieties about the work climate many students and postdocs will soon enter, in which grant budgets are shrinking and PI positions are highly competitive. But the audience also asked evergreen questions about careers in science, like how to keep up lab morale and balance research with family life.

“Choose your spouse very wisely,” Kornbluth said, drawing laughs.

Sally Kornbluth, Duke's soon-to-be Provost, talks about managing a lab. The talk will be available online soon.

Sally Kornbluth, Duke’s soon-to-be provost, talks about managing a lab (Photo: David Steinbrenner). The talk will be available online soon.

Music, the Brain and Jimi Hendrix

By Ashley Mooney

On March 10, 2014

In Biology, Faculty, Lecture, Neuroscience

By Ashley Mooney

Hearing music and moving to it are more connected than you’d think.

Richard Mooney and one of his research subjects. (Photo – Duke Magazine)

Neurobiologists have traditionally viewed human responses to sound as reflexive.

But in fact, perception of sound and music can be viewed as much more dynamic, said Richard Mooney, George Barth Geller professor of neurobiology and classically-trained guitarist. Rather than speaking in a typical lecture hall, Mooney presented his research in Motorco Music Hall.

“In the classic view of how the nervous system works, there’s a sensory stimulus in the world that excites our sensory receptors and then we behave,” Mooney said. “This can’t be so. We don’t live in a reflexive experience. We’re living in a state where we’re present in the moment.”

Using a video of musician Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Johnny B. Goode,” Mooney illustrated the connection between the motor system and the auditory cortex.

“Hendrix is anticipating all these dynamics in music, moving his body in a way to accentuate it,” Mooney said. “It’s a really good example of how our brain must be forecasting the sound it wants to make or the sound it wants to experience.”

Mooney cited a study in which trained keyboard players were asked either to listen to music without making physical movements or to play a piece without being able to hear it. Using functional MRI, researchers found that the auditory cortex, the supplementary motor area and the premotor cortex of the brain all receive more oxygen than other sections during either task, implying a connection between the systems.

“Music isn’t passive. Even when we’re listening, it’s engaging not only the biological amplifier in our ear, but also this really complex network of sensory motor structures in our brain,” Mooney said.

800px-Uncoiled_cochlea_with_basilar_membrane

An uncoiled cochlea with the basilar membrane. Courtesy of Wikimedia commons.

A part of the inner ear called the cochlea functions as an acoustical prism, splitting complex sounds into an array of simpler, tone-like components.

“The lens of our eye focuses stimuli in a way that’s Cartesian,” Mooney said. “In contrast, what our ear has to do is really take a mismatched pattern of energy that’s vibrating in our eardrum and decompose it into simpler components.”

People have biological amplifiers deep in their cochlea that allow them to perceive and interpret speech and music. Average-volume speech usually causes the basilar membrane, a structure in the inner ear, to vibrate within a very small distance—approximately the diameter of a gold atom. Mooney noted that the level of vibration indicates that the membrane moves about 100-fold more than it would if the system were purely passive.

The cochlea even vibrates in deaf ears, just not to the same extent. But much of a person’s ability to hear, that is to discern differences in pitch and the nuances of spoken language, also rely on hair cells within the ear.

“These aren’t the things responsible for your grandfather’s tufts of hair that are coming out of his ears,” Mooney said. “These are all a special kind of nerve cell called a receptor cell.”

Even though all people have connections between their motor and auditory systems and may understand the connections conceptually, musicians and those who frequently practice making music can usually predict upcoming tones with more accuracy.

He provided the example of basketball players shooting free throws. If shown video clips of a person shooting a free throw, but not the final trajectory, only professional players can accurately predict whether the ball went into the basket. Sportscasters and audience members cannot accurately predict baskets, even if they are highly exposed to watching the actions.

The lecture was part of Brain Awareness Week, a global campaign to encourage public interest in the progress and benefits of brain research. Mooney noted that Brain Awareness Week helps him gain a different perspective on his research.

“Scientists hang out with themselves in their labs and they ask each other these really sort of pointy headed questions all the time,” he said. “They don’t get a lot of chances to hear from people who have really different perspectives.”

The final event in the series was a hands-on demonstration at the Museum of Life and Science, Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m.

My Brain and Your Brain Speak Different Languages

By Clara Colombatto

On March 5, 2014

In Behavior/Psychology, Faculty, Lecture, Medicine, Neuroscience, Science Communication & Education

By Clara Colombatto

The fact that “different people speak language differently” is one of the major challenges in uncovering the neural basis of language. Brain structure and function differ highly among individuals, and this is the core of the new discipline of cognitive neurolinguistics. Duke professor Edna Andrews explained the fascinating complexity of language research at the Regulator Bookshop on Tuesday, March 4.

Edna Andrews gives an overview of the new field of cognitive neurolinguistics at the Regulator Bookshop for Brain Awareness Week Credit: Clara Colombatto

Edna Andrews gives an overview of the new field of cognitive neurolinguistics at the Regulator Bookshop for Brain Awareness Week (Photo: Clara Colombatto)

A linguist by training, Edna Andrews is the Nancy & Jeffrey Marcus Distinguished Professor of Slavic & Eurasian Studies, Chair of the Linguistics Program and holds appointments in Cultural Anthropology and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Over time, Andrews’s research interests led her to neuroscience — so she went back to the classroom, studied as a beginning student with neurobiologist Gillian Einstein and shadowed a team of neurosurgeons at Duke Hospital.

This range of disciplines is fundamental for Andrews’ pioneering work in the field of cognitive neurolinguistics. Observations of brain-damaged patients led to a 19^th century model that held that language centers are mainly in the left hemisphere of the brain. In particular, language was thought to be dependent on grey matter, the part of the brain that contains mostly cell bodies and is responsible for information processing, as opposed to white matter, which contains mainly long-range connection tracts (axons) and is responsible for information communication. Researchers realized this understanding was an oversimplification when surgeons started to notice that cutting white matter tracts alone significantly impaired linguistic abilities. New methods, such as electrical stimulation of the brain during surgeries in awake patients, led to the realization that the whole brain is involved in language.

White matter fiber tracts of a human brain visualized with a Tensor Imaging technique. The U-shaped fibers connect the two hemispheres. The finding that these tracts are essential for language revolutionized the field of neurolinguistics because language was previously thought to be localized to gray matter in the left hemisphere. Credit: Thomas Schultz via Wikimedia Commons

White matter fiber tracts visualized with a tensor imaging technique. Findings that the fibers connecting the two hemispheres are essential for language revolutionized the field of neurolinguistics.
(Photo: Thomas Schultz via Wikimedia Commons)

When theoretical linguists such as Andrews joined the conversation, they merged empirical data with theory to answer questions such as, is language learned or innate? Are there specific structures and localized circuits in the brain responsible for language? And are there critical periods where our brain is particularly sensitive to changes?

The picture is complicated by the fact that “most of the world population is bi or multilingual,” and “one could argue that in fact there are no monolinguals.” In our daily lives, we use different languages at school, at work and at home (Learn more about this hypothesis here). Andrews’ current work addresses these complexities by looking at changes in neural activity as individual speakers acquire Russian as a second or third language. Her latest book “Neuroscience and Multilingualism,” coming out at the end of the year from Cambridge University Press, is an exploration of the neuroscientific modeling of multilingualism.

The lecture was part of Brain Awareness Week, a global campaign to encourage public interest in the progress and benefits of brain research. Not to miss: Michele Diaz on “Language and the Aging Brain” on Thursday, 3/5 at 7:30pm, and Richard Mooney on “Music and the Brain” on Friday, 3/6 at 6 pm at Motorco Music Hall.

Four Things You May Not Know about Ecologist E.O. Wilson

By Erin Weeks

On February 12, 2014

In Animals, Biology, Climate/Global Change, Environment/Sustainability, Lecture

By Erin Weeks

Edward O Wilson Red Hills, Aalabama 2010 by Beth Maynor Young 6x9_0

(Photo: Beth Maynor Young)

Edward O. Wilson is one of the most renowned living biologists, the world’s foremost authority on ants, and for a little while at least, a member of the Duke faculty.

Wilson is on campus teaching the first of an annual course, part of a recent partnership between the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation and Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Feb. 11, he spoke to a sold-out auditorium about “The Diversity of Life,” a lecture that was equal parts awe-inspiring facts, humorous anecdotes from a life in science and call to arms for future generations.

Here are four things the audience learned last night about E.O. Wilson.

1. He’s dabbled in dreams of Jurassic Park. When asked what he thought of de-extinction, the plan to resurrect vanished species using their DNA, Wilson enumerated all the reasons why the efforts may be futile: we have only genetic shreds; the appropriate habitat may be gone; we can’t produce breeding populations from limited DNA.

But then he paused. “I’ll tell you frankly,” he said, “I’d like to see a mammoth.”

2. He made his first scientific discovery as an adolescent. An eye permanently damaged in a fishing accident led the young Wilson to his interest in ants, which he could view up close. One day in his native Alabama, he discovered a ferocious mound-building species he’d never seen before. He didn’t recognize it then, but those were among the first of the destructive red fire ants that would soon invade the entire Southeast, causing billions of dollars of economic and medical damage.

3. The man is 84 and still going strong. Professor Wilson closed his talk with a passage from his newest book, arriving in April, called “A Window on Eternity: A Biologist’s Walk Through Gorongosa National Park.” He’s written two dozen other books, including a foray into fiction at age 80 (the novel, called Anthill, won him the 2010 Heartland Prize for fiction).

4. The future is in nematodes. Or fungi. Or Archaea. Throughout the talk, Wilson reiterated his hopes for young scientists to become the cataloguers and guardians of Earth’s immense biological diversity. Only a fraction of the planet’s estimated species of nematodes, fungi and Archaea are known to science, and “these little things run the world,” he said.

The need for “-ologists” has never been greater, he said.

(Photo: Jared Lazarus)

VIEW THE ENTIRE TALK (YouTube, 1:10 with introductions)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-DZ0CUKn2Y?rel=0]

Advice in the "Love Market" from Dan Ariely

By Olivia Zhu

On February 11, 2014

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Faculty, Lecture

In a simulation in which he doled out five dollars to every audience member, Ariely demonstrated that a small gender inequality leads to an enormous balance of power. One gender would be competing, in this case paying, for a partner of the opposite sex, and thus expending all of their resources supply and demand-style.

By Olivia Zhu

With Valentine’s Day approaching—ripe with the promise of love for some and fraught with the bitter reminder of love unfulfilled for others—Duke professor Dan Ariely shared what he’s learned about the “love market” by analyzing romance from a behavioral economic perspective.

Starting with the premise of assortative mating—the principle that “hot” people date “hot” people, and “not hot” people date others who are “not hot”—Ariely asked how the “not hot” psychologically cope with their “unattractive” partners. His answer: “not hot” people “reframe what is important to them” and focus on non-physical qualities, like humor.

Using regression-based labor analysis, Ariely discovered that the most attractive quality in men was height. In fact, for a 5’ 9” man to be equally attractive to a 5’ 10” man, he would have to make $40,000 more in salary per year. Not to fear—men were equally shallow. The most attractive quality in a woman was BMI, with the optimal being 18.5 (slightly underweight). No amount of money could make up for a woman’s BMI; men didn’t care about a woman’s salary or her graduate degree.

Ariely also discussed the pitfalls of online dating. Online dating often ends in repeated disappointment, he said, not only because of embellished profiles, but because your imagination fills in the gaps of a potential date’s personality with ideal, untrue qualities. Moreover, online dating is inefficient, with an exchange rate of six hours of talking for one coffee date.

To improve your online dating experience, Ariely suggested “going and doing stuff together,” even if in an online environment, and asking provoking questions about past relationships and sexual fantasies rather than sticking with mundane, interview-style dates. He also found that too many online “options” decreased one’s happiness by making one pickier. Perhaps we shouldn’t have so much freedom in our love lives, after all.

Why Cute Babies are a Cognitive Illusion

By sa160@duke.edu

On February 11, 2014

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Neuroscience

By Nonie Arora

Daniel Dennett, Co-Director Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, spoke last week to a packed room at Duke University’s annual Mind, Brain, and Behavior lecture. He said that The Hard Problem of Consciousness, which describes how we have subjective conscious experiences, rests on a series of straightforward mistakes.

“The Hard Problem is a cognitive illusion,” Dennett said.

Cartesian Theater. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Dennett’s conclusion rests on two tenets: (1) there is no Cartesian theater and (2) there is no second transduction. The Cartesian theater is an image of a place where the show happens; Dennett said it is where the decisions get made, according to some philosophers.

The second transduction is the idea that the nervous system first converts outer stimuli to neural signals and then the brain translates these signals to some other medium of consciousness, as originally suggested by Descartes. Some theorists still believe that there is a second transduction into a physical medium in the brain that has not been identified, but according to Dennett’s book Kinds of Minds, this idea is a myth.

Dennett said that the features in our brain are more similar to DVDs than to cinema films. They are not iconic. If you show a caveman a DVD, what will he think? He’ll think: where are the mini pictures, where is the sound? Anybody who thinks that there is a Hard Problem is making the analogous naive error about consciousness, Dennett explained.

Depiction of consciousness. Credit: New Yorker 1969 Saul Steinberg

We are the “unwitting creators of fiction,” he said. “Babies are not inherently cute. They’re cute because we adore them. Shapes of babies faces stimulate nurturing behavior… This is an evolved adaptation. We misinterpret an inner reaction as an outer cause,” he said.

He believes that we project our innate predispositions into the manifest world. Thus, we have a propensity to think that babies are cute. “We have expectations about our expectations,” he said. “Not only do we feel the urge to reach out and cuddle, we expect to feel that urge. Our satisfaction of that expectation confirms our perception of cuteness of the baby.”

Interested in hearing more from Dennett?

Learn more about the illusion of consciousness or why babies aren’t actually cute.

Are We Merely Machines? Defining the Qualities That Make Us Human

By Olivia Zhu

On January 30, 2014

In Computers/Technology, Engineering, Faculty, Lecture

Dr. Picard speaks with Dr. Michael Gustafson of Duke University

By Olivia Zhu

In an age where the line between humans and robots begins to blur, we’re hard-pressed to identify the source of our uniqueness as humans. Dr. Rosalind Picard of MIT provided insight to that question during the Veritas Forum on Wednesday, January 29.

As a leader of the Affective Computing Research Group, Dr. Picard develops technologies that interpret and display emotion. For example, MACH is an interactive program that analyzes voice inflections and their corresponding emotional connotations to help MIT students refine their interview skills.

Improved sensors can inform parents and educators when autistic children and infants are under stress, which a child himself may not be able to communicate. But despite their lifelike appearances, the robots still lack feeling and experience, according to Dr. Picard.

Although Picard attempts to mimic humanity in her technology, she firmly denied that we are merely machines. She said that assembling a system—in this instance, a human—lends one a better understanding of that system; however, it does not give one a complete understanding of what makes us human.

Adding an element of faith to her lecture, she said that a person can only have full knowledge of humanity after death. What, then, makes us human? While the audience primarily suggested love or consciousness, Picard held that the defining human quality is the capacity for a relationship with God, “the very author of all meaning, of all emotion, all consciousness.” She went on to discuss her own faith, founded largely by reading the Bible.

To continue this conversation, further discussion will be held at 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, February 5^th in Social Psychology 130. The panel will feature Duke professors Ray Barfield, Bill Allard, and Connie Walker.

Learn to Fly a Drone in Three Minutes

By Erin Weeks

On January 29, 2014

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Faculty, Lecture, Visualization

By Erin Weeks

Missy Cummings has accomplished a lot of difficult things in her life — she was one of the Navy’s first female pilots, after all — but being a guest on The Colbert Report, she said, was hard.

Cummings told the story of her journey from Naval lieutenant to media drone expert last week at the Visualization Friday Forum seminar series in a talk (video archived here) titled “Designing a System for Navigating Small Drones in Tight Spaces.”

Missy Cummings joined Duke as an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science last semester.

Last semester, Cummings moved her renowned Humans and Automation Lab from MIT to Duke University. She’s wasted no time immersing herself in the new university and volunteered for the semester’s first seminar to introduce herself and her lab’s latest work to Duke’s visualization community.

Cummings’ research over recent years has centered on the development of a smartphone interface through which, she said, anyone can learn to pilot a one-pound drone in three minutes. The technology could be a boon to the U.S. Army, which now issues smartphones to its personnel and mostly relies on cumbersome, gas-powered drones.

The lab tested the technology by asking volunteers to maneuver a drone through an obstacle course both in the field — where they learned wind and cold temperatures are not a drone’s friend — and in simulated environments.

One of the things they discovered in both cases was that individuals who performed well in a spatial reasoning test were more likely to complete the obstacle course. Moreover, these performances tended to be gendered, with men scoring higher than women in spatial reasoning. Interestingly, Cummings noted, other studies have shown women tend to perform better piloting drones in long-term, “boring” scenarios with little action.

Cummings is interested in teasing out the reasons for these results, which could have significant implications for the U.S. Army or companies one day interested in hiring drone pilots.

As Stephen Colbert confirmed, you may be able to fly a drone with three minutes’ training, but that doesn’t mean you can fly it well.

Cummings talks to a full house at the Visualization Friday Forum on January 24.

Mining Appalachia has permanent effects on its landscape

By Ashley Mooney

On January 27, 2014

In Animals, Environment/Sustainability, Field Research, Lecture

A satellite comparison of the Hobet-21 Mine in 1987 and 2002 (Courtesy of NASA).

A satellite comparison of the Hobet-21 Mine in 1987 (below) and 2002 (Courtesy of NASA).

By Ashley Mooney

While mining the Appalachian mountains provides fuel to many areas of the East coast, Mariah Arnold, Fulbright scholar and Duke doctoral candidate, found that current mining practices may release toxic substances that devastate local ecosystems.

Arnold said about 450 mountains across the country have been destroyed by mountaintop mining. She focuses her research on the Hobet-21 mine in southeastern West Virginia—the largest surface mine in the state.

“The problem with mountaintop mining is that the impacts are so long term,” said Richard Di Giulio, professor of environmental toxicology and Arnold’s advisor. “We’ve blown away mountains and they will never come back.”

Most mountaintop mining in West Virginia occurs in remote, sparsely populated areas, Di Giulio said. Although one can drive relatively close to the sites themselves, the true effects are hard to see from the ground.

During mountaintop mining, miners extract coal by removing the land above the coal seams, then use a process called valley filling to repurpose the excess land, Arnold said. The process releases selenium, a sometimes toxic naturally occurring element found in the earth.

Arnold and Research Analyst Ty Lindberg collecting samples in the Mud River. Courtesy of Mariah Arnold and Ty Lindberg.

“Selenium is released into the environment when you blast off that mountain and you have all that excess rock, which has been in that mountain for a very long time,” Arnold said. “When you expose it to the air and rain and weathering events, that rock is broken down, and in that rock is selenium. Selenium is then washed down into aquatic habitats.”

Not all forms of selenium are toxic, and some are actually required in human diets to survive. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website, there is a limit on “the highest concentration of [selenium] in surface water to which an aquatic community can be exposed indefinitely without resulting in an unacceptable effect.”

Arnold found that samples taken from the Mud River, which flows through the mining site, contain significantly more selenium than the legal limit. The excess selenium has killed off several fish species and caused reproductive failure and jaw deformities in the remaining fish, she said. Species from a fork of the river that does not flow through the mining site do not exhibit the same problems.

A key to Arnold’s findings is biofilm, which refers to a group of microorganisms that stick to each other on surfaces in the river. The biofilm in the Mud River converts the selenium released from mining from an inorganic, harmless form to a dangerous organic form of the compound. Some animals, including fish and insects, eat the biofilm and therefore ingest the now-harmful substance.

“A third of [the selenium in the river] was in green algae,” Arnold said. “The first thing these fish eat is that green algae, so that’s really the dose the fish are getting…. These biofilms are controlling the movement of selenium.”

The long-term impact of selenium exposure in many species, including humans, is still unknown, said Di Giulio. Future studies will include selenium’s effect on human health and further understanding the role of biofilm.

While some species can evolve and adapt to the rising selenium concentrations, Di Giulio said the mountains themselves could never recover, because they require hundreds of years to adapt to the changing ecology.

“You have forever essentially destroyed this landscape,” Di Giulio said. “You go there, its like, ‘oh we need flat space here for shopping centers and hospitals and schools,’ but yet the population density really is [low]. Do you need this much?”