Hi! I’m Devin, one of the newest members of the Duke Research Blog team, as well as the Duke community as a whole. I’m thrilled to be given the opportunity to write about some of the research going on at this incredible school. It amazes me to think that some of the people I’ve jostled with for a spot on the C-1 bus may be involved in cutting-edge investigations into biomedical engineering, education, animal behavior, economics, and much more.
I hail from a variety of places, including Michigan, Tennessee, and Belgium, but most recently Reston, Virginia. Now, Pegram is the place I call home.
Two adult guinea pigs, from Wikimedia Commons
Back at home, I was involved in a project working on developing a sustainable agriculture system for my high school. I also volunteered as a foster parent for a guinea pig rescue for several years. While I miss working for that noble cause, I’ve swapped out guinea pigs for lemurs by becoming a member of the Roots & Shoots club here on campus. Other activities I’m involved in are the Outing Club, the Environmental Alliance, and most recently, the eco-representative organization for my residence hall.
I’m pretty much all over the map at Duke, both in terms of my academic interests and the amount of times I’ve gotten hopelessly lost. However, I am strongly considering a double major in environmental science and French.
I can’t wait to help share the research projects that my fellow Blue Devils are working on!
I’m YunChu. In my former (read: pre-Duke) life, I was a dashing cow mascot/enthusiast, sousaphone player, and preschool teacher.
Charming a bride who desperately needed a Chick-fil-A milkshake after her wedding party
Since then, I’ve played the bassoon with my professor at a local Durham bar, drank my fair share of subpar Turkish beers in the beautiful city of Istanbul, and spent a disproportionate amount of my college career standing in front of the extensive chocolate bar selection in our beloved campus café, Bella Union. Now a senior at Duke, I’m scrambling to figure out the meaning of life along with my thesis topic and slowly coming to terms with my (appalling) recent discovery of the fact that you cannot spell YunChu without the “unc”.
Sometimes I get to do cool things like write briefs for congressmen or explore data management options for the White House Switchboard. This time, as you might have inferred from the title of this post, I’ve acquired the newest and coolest job on campus where I’ll be going around bugging friends, professors, and strangers alike about blogging their research—I’ve finally found a good excuse!
Join me as I document my last year of exploring this rich community that is Duke Research, brought to you in cocktail conversation-esque snapshots. We’ll be marveling over elegant solutions, chuckling over quirky explanations, and having a grand ole’ time appreciating just how diverse and incredible our friends and colleagues really are.
Hi! My name is Madeline Halpert and I am a freshman at Duke this year. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so I’m very excited about the Durham weather, and to be a writer for the Duke research blog!
Although I do not have an extensive background in science, besides the typical high school science courses, I look forward to the many opportunities to learn about the scientific field here at Duke. I have some experience in journalism, as I was an editor-in-chief of my high school newsmagazine. I have also written an op-ed in The New York Times as well as a piece for Scholastic’s Choices Magazine about teenagers who have struggled with depression. In the past I have enjoyed writing in-depth feature stories about topics such as the pressures of the high school educational system, mental health and incarceration. This year, I am excited to broaden my areas of expertise and try a different style of writing. I think the Duke research blog will be the perfect place to do that.
Over the next four years I plan to take a variety of science courses, and try out some of the wonderful research opportunities Duke has to offer.
Although I am not certain of my major, I am leaning towards studying English and perhaps obtaining a certificate in journalism. In my free time, I enjoy long distance running and playing guitar, and am happy to be a part of The Chronicle and the running club this year.
I’m very much looking forward to learning about different types of research and researchers, and sharing my experiences via blogging!
Student project teams have become an important part of engineering education at Duke and elsewhere in recent years, but our campus wasn’t always the easiest place for them to work.
DukeMakers showed off a 3D-printed replica of Duke Chapel in the same blue as its construction tarping.
When the robotic submarine team needed to test for leaks in their craft, “we used to roll a bin down the hallway at CIEMAS and fill it up at the water fountain,” said Will Stewart, a junior on the club.
Stewart was showing off his team’s shiny new workroom in The Foundry, a purpose-built 7,600-square-foot space on two levels in the basement of Gross Hall. It has a huge industrial sink.
The Foundry’s airy main workspace was once the home to grimy, ugly machinery that sustained Gross Hall.
Throughout the Foundry, lockers for gear double as whiteboards and sturdy butcher block tables stand ready to take any pounding, grinding and soldering the students can dream up.
In addition to the dedicated spaces for the larger project teams. there is plenty of meeting space and shop space for optics and electronics and some light machining.
Originally the home to big, ugly utilities for the one-time chemistry building, the Foundry space was converted for student use with input from students and faculty representing the Pratt School of Engineering, the Innovation Co-Lab, Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Nicholas School of the Environment, the Physics Department, and Gross Hall neighbors the Energy Initiative and the Information Initiative.
“It’s amazing that what was actually an ugly space in the basement could turn into a beautiful space for students,” Interim Engineering Dean George Truskey said in brief remarks.
Owen Chung demonstrated IEEE’s robo drink mixer that can combine six different fluids on command from an iPhone app.
The Electric Vehicle Club is looking forward to having one good space, rather than six cramped rooms spread around Hudson Hall to build their super-efficient carbon fiber prototypes. “So far, what we have fits, but we’re actually looking for more space,” said club president Charlie Kritzmacher. “We’re a pretty big club.”
By Karl Leif Bates, Director of Research Communications
Six countries and eight months later, I’m finally back at Duke after a junior-spring hiatus for a study abroad program in Spain. My experience abroad, while just as colorful as the Spanish
View of Spanish street from Plaza Mayor, Madrid
stereotype (and equally filled with paella and sangria), extended much deeper than beaches and bullfights. Fulfilling my Trinity requirements of social sciences through my Duke in Madrid courses unveiled challenging perspectives on memory, particularly of the Spanish Civil War, and on the psychology of the Spanish population and its individuals.
One of the greatest themes throughout my experience was the evolution of technology. Our Duke cohort of eight students visited the Cave of Altamira in rainy, northern Spain, which holds some of the world’s most famous, miraculously preserved cave paintings. More than anything, the physicality of the paintings, the oldest of which dated 35,600 years old, shocked me. The sheer passage of time embodied by the paintings eclipsed our human history twenty-fold, and our generation many times over.
In Altamira, I witnessed the evolution of perspective, as the cave artists experimented with foreground and background using raised and lowered ridges of the cave; simultaneously, my perspective on self-importance, at least in comparison to the whole of human history, changed. Not only is a lifespan negligible compared to the age of the world, but it is also only a drop in the bucket of the world’s population. A scientific discovery only makes an impact in the context of the accumulation of the world’s intelligence and knowledge, just as one cave painting gains more meaning from the context of all the paintings, older and newer, around it.
In May, I transitioned to a much more temporal study of technology in the Silicon Valley,
Photo credit: Robert Hahn
specifically as a software engineering intern at Google. I worked on the Fonts and Text team under Internationalization, where I sharpened my engineering prowess under a canopy of red, yellow, and blue umbrellas amid a sea of cheerful bike bell rings. While I met a wide range of interns and engineers working on a range of fascinating, impactful projects, I definitely applied my mind in a much more focused, practical manner. A modern day in engineering definitely stands in stark contrast to the lofty speculation I undertook in Spain.
Back in Durham, as I navigate foreign pathways, puzzle at the changed food venues, and double-take at new Duke buildings that seem to have popped up out of nowhere after construction, I’m thoroughly happy to have returned to Duke with a fresh mindset and renewed energy. After time away, the research that occurs here only seems more incredible, and I’m excited to explore it and write about it in the coming year.
Post by Olivia Zhu, senior, Biophysics major and Computer Science minor
Fractions strike fear in the hearts of many grade schoolers – but a new study reveals that they don’t pose a problem for monkeys.
Even as adults, many of us struggle to compute tips, work out our taxes, or perform a slew of other tasks that use proportions or percentages. Where did our teachers and parents go wrong when explaining discounts and portions of pie? Are our brains simply not built to handle quantitative part-whole relationships?
Fractions and logical relationships are some of the things a wild macaque might think about while grooming and being groomed. (image copyright Lauren Brent)
To try to answer these questions, my colleagues and I wanted to test whether other species understand fractions. If our fellow primates can reason about proportions, our minds likely evolved to do so too.
In our study, which appears online in the journal Animal Cognition, Marley Rossa (Trinity 2014), Dr. Elizabeth Brannon, and I asked whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are able to compare ratios.
We let the monkeys play on a touch-screen computer for a candy reward. First we trained them to distinguish between two shapes that appeared on the screen: a black circle and a white diamond. When they touched the black circle, they heard a ding sound and received a piece of candy. But when they touched the white diamond, they heard a buzz sound and did not get any candy. The candy-loving monkeys quickly developed a habit of choosing the rewarding black circle.
Fractions example taken from sheppardsoftware.com
Next we introduced fractions. We showed two arrays on the screen, each with several black circles and white diamonds. The monkeys’ job was to touch the array having a greater ratio of black circles to white diamonds. For example, if there were three black circles and nine white diamonds on the left, and eight black circles and five white diamonds on the right, the monkey needed to touch the right side of the screen to earn her candy (8:5 is better than 3:9).
We didn’t always make it so easy, though. Sometimes both arrays had more black circles than white diamonds, or vice versa. Sometimes the array with the higher black-circle-to-white-diamond ratio actually had fewer black circles overall. They needed to find the largest fraction of black circles. For example, if there were eight black circles and 16 white diamonds on the left (8:16), and five black circles and six white diamonds on the right (5:6), the correct answer would be the latter, even though there were more black circles on the left side. That is how we made sure that monkeys were paying attention to the relative numbers of shapes in both arrays.
The monkeys were able to learn to compare proportions. They chose the array with the higher black-circle-to-white-diamond ratio about three-quarters of the time. Impressively, when we showed them new arrays with number combinations they had never seen before, the monkeys still tended to select the array with the better ratio.
Our results suggest that monkeys understand the magnitude of ratios. They also indicate that monkeys might be able to answer another type of question: analogies. These four-part statements you may have seen on standardized tests take the form “glove is to hand as sock is to foot.”
This kind of reasoning requires not only recognizing the relationship between two items (glove and hand) but also how that relationship compares with the relationship between the other two items (sock and foot). Understanding the relationships between relationships — that is, second-order relationships — was believed to require language, making it possibly a uniquely human ability. But in our study, monkeys successfully determined the relationship between two fractions – each one a relationship between two numbers – to make their choices.
If monkeys can reason about ratios and maybe even analogies, our minds are likely to have been set up with these skills as well.
The next step for this line of research will be to figure out how best to employ these in-born abilities when teaching proportions, percentages, and fractions to human children.
CITATION: “Comparison of discrete ratios by rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)” Caroline B. Drucker, Marley A. Rossa, Elizabeth M. Brannon. Animal Cognition, Aug. 19, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-015-0914-9
Guest post by graduate student Caroline B. Drucker. Caroline is curious about both the evolutionary origins and neural basis of numerical cognition, which she currently studies in lemurs and rhesus monkeys.
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.
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.
Every exhausted parent can be tempted to check out at times, especially when the little ones are testing limits.
A happy child, presumably not neglected, buried in sand. (D. Sharon Pruitt via Wikimedia Commons)
But when moments of autopilot become months or years, that is considered emotional neglect and it’s strongly linked to the subsequent development of clinical depression in children. Ahmad Hariri’s lab at Duke studies emotional neglect, defined as a caregiver consistently overlooking signs that a child needs comfort or attention, even for something positive.
“Early in life, during infancy, an emotional neglectful parent would regularly be unresponsive and uninvolved with their child,” said Jamie Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher in Hariri’s group. “In early childhood, parents would be clearly unengaged in playing with the child, showing little to no affection during interactions.”
In a study published online in Biological Psychiatry, Hanson, Hariri and their collaborator Douglas Williamson of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center San Antonio, found that the more emotional neglect the children had experienced in their lives, the less responsive their brain was to a reward (winning money in a card game). They had scanned the brains of 106 children between 11 and 15 years of age, and then again two years later.
The scientists focused on the ventral striatum, a brain area known to fire up in response to positive feedback. This region is thought to play a role in optimism and hopefulness, and its dysfunction has been associated with depression. The team wondered: Are the kids with dulled ventral striatum activity more likely to have symptoms of depression? They were.
Ahmad Hariri
Depression rates start to rise around 15 or 16 years of age, and that’s why the team focused on this age. The cohort of kids they studied were part of Williamson’s Teen Alcohol Outcomes Study (TAOS), and Hanson and Hariri hope to continue following them.
In a different cohort called the Duke Neurogenetics Study, Hariri’s team has found that the responsiveness of the ventral striatum and the amygdala — another area that handles life stress — may help predict how likely young adults are to develop problem drinking in response to stress or to engage in risky sexual behavior.
Being able to identify the children or young adults who are at risk for depression and anxiety is a tall order. But the possibility that we could one day funnel extra support to these individuals and help them avoid a lifetime of medicines and therapy is what keeps Hariri and his team going.
Personally, as a parent, I’m excited see what the Hariri group will do next. During our interview, I couldn’t help running a few scenarios by him and Hanson. Am I emotionally neglecting my toddler if she’s having a tantrum and I have to leave the room or I’ll scream?
“You can have a bad week,” said Hariri, who is also a dad. “You’re not ruining your kid.”
Guest post by Kelly Rae Chi, a Cary-based freelance writer who covers brain science for Duke Research.
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.
