Last Monday, Oct. 17, Duke University students who had conducted global health research had the opportunity to present their work. From North Carolina to Sub-Saharan Africa, the 2022 Global Health Research Showcase featured works that tackle some of the world’s most pressing health issues. Over 40 undergraduate, Masters, and PhD student projects examined a broad range of issues, determinants, and phenomena in countries from almost every continent. Here’s a few project highlights, in case you missed it:
Maeve Salm, pursuing her Master of Science in Global Health, went to Tanzania to study contraceptive use. Tanzania’s youth are highly impacted by teen pregnancy, and Salm wanted to understand desires for contraceptive use among adolescents affected by HIV. She learned that, much like in the U.S., stigma influences access to sexual healthcare for adolescents. This qualitative study aimed to support young people in achieving their desired health outcomes and reducing HIV transmission by examining barriers and facilitators to family planning. Findings indicate that youth agency in reproductive health is of utmost importance.
Maeve Salm presenting her poster at the 2022 Global Health Research Symposium.
Wondering about the Covid-19 response in other countries? Master of Science in Global Health Candidate Stephanie Stan explored the barriers and enablers to the pandemic response in Peru. Per capita, Peru experienced the highest mortality rate form the disease compared to any other country. Due to several challenging factors, they were slow to receive COVID-19 vaccines. However, they implemented highly successful vaccination campaigns once vaccines were obtained. What can be learned from Peru’s pandemic response? Prolonged and proactive collaborations between sectors (healthcare, academics, and government) enable swift public health responses in a crisis. It’s important to have elected officials who are empowered to make decisions promoting science.
“Definitely meeting all the incredible people that I interviewed and learning about their work and involvement in Peru’s pandemic response. Learning about what happens moving forward from their point of view.”
Stephanie Stan, when asked about her global health research experience
Winning the first-place Graduate Student Research Award, Judith Mwobobia’s project examined the stigma of cancer in sub-Saharan Africa. Stigma is a huge barrier to receiving treatment, which is a problem considering that 70% of global cancer deaths originate from Africa. Perceptions of financial stress, misconceptions about cancer, and fear of death were common attitudes driving cancer stigma. Proposed interventions included education and policy recommendations for low-resourced communities. Mwobobia is pursuing her Master of Science in Global Health. Clearly a supportive group, her classmates erupted in cheers when the award was announced.
“To me [this image] captures the wonder, the awe, the beauty of sound and the brain that tries to make sense of it,” said professor Nina Kraus, Northwestern University researcher and author of “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World.”
Stop. What do you hear?
We might not always think about the sounds around us, but our brains are always listening, said Northwestern University professor Nina Kraus.
Kraus, auditory researcher and author of “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World,” spoke via Zoom to a Duke audience in October. She has published more than four hundred papers on the auditory system in humans and other animals and how it’s affected by conditions like autism, aging, and concussion. She discussed some of her findings and how “the sound mind” affects us in our day-to-day lives.
One of the slides from Kraus’s presentation. We can think of sound as having many “ingredients.”
“I think of the sound mind as encompassing how we think, how we move, how we sense, and how we feel,” Kraus said. We live in a “visually dominated world,” but for hearing people, sound plays an important role in language, music, rhythm, and how we perceive the world.
One of the slides from Kraus’s presentation. The human auditory system involves not just the ears but also several regions of the brain. The “hearing brain” engages movement, cognition, and emotions along with interpreting direct sensory input from all senses.
Kraus discussed the auditory system and how much of what we think of as hearing takes place in the brain. We can think of sound as signals outside the head and electricity as signals inside the head (neural processing). When those two merge, learning occurs, and we can make sound-to-meaning connections.
Another slide from Kraus’s presentation. In an experiment, teaching rabbits to associate a sound with meaning (in this case, more carrots) changed patterns of neuron firing in the auditory cortex, even in individual neurons. “Same sound, same neuron, and yet the neuron responded differently… because now there’s a sound-to-meaning connection,” Kraus said.
Despite how sensitive our neurons and brains are to sound, things can get lost in translation. Kraus studies how conditions like concussions and hearing loss can adversely affect auditory processing. Even among healthy brains, we all hear and interpret sounds differently. People have unique “sonic fingerprints” that are relatively stable over time within an individual brain but differ between people. These patterns of sound recognition are apparent when scientists record brain responses to music or other sounds.
“One of the biological measures that we have been using in human and in animal models,” Kraus said, is FFR (frequency following response) to speech. FFR-to-speech can be used to analyze an individual’s auditory processing system. It also allows scientists to convert brain responses back into sound waves. “The sound wave and the brainwave resemble each other, which is just remarkable.”
One of Kraus’s slides. Technology called frequency following response (FFR) can be used to convert brain waves back into original sound (like a song).
This technology helps reveal just how attuned our brains are to sound. When we hear a song, our brain waves respond to everything from the beat to the melody. Those brain waves are so specific to that particular song or sound that when scientists convert the brain waves back into sound, the resulting music is still recognizable.
When scientists try this on people who have experienced a concussion, for instance, the recreated music can sound different or garbled. Experiments that compare healthy and unhealthy brains can help reveal what concussions do to the brain and our ability to interpret sound. But not everything that affects auditory processing is bad.
Musical training is famously good for the brain, and experiments done by Kraus and other scientists support that conclusion. “The musician signature—something that develops over time—” has specific patterns, and it can enhance certain components of auditory processing over time. Making music might also improve language skills. “The music and language signatures really overlap,” Kraus said, “which is why making music is so good for strengthening our sound mind.” Kids who can synchronize to a beat, for example, tend to have better language skills according to some of the experiments Kraus has been involved with.
Musicians are also, on average, better at processing sound in noisy environments. Musicians respond well in quiet and noisy environments. Non-musicians, on the other hand, respond well in quiet environments, but that response “really breaks down” in noisy ones.
Interestingly, “Making music has a lifelong impact. Making music in early life can strengthen the sound mind when one is seventy or eighty years old.”
A slide from Kraus’s presentation. Musicians tend to be better at processing sounds in noisy environments.
Exercise, too, can improve auditory processing. “Elite division 1 athletes have especially quiet brains” with less neural noise. That’s a good thing; it lets incoming information “stand out more.”
In experiments, healthy athletes also have a more consistent response over time across multiple trials, especially women.
These benefits aren’t limited to elite athletes, though. According to Kraus, “Being fit and flexible is one of the best things you can do for your brain,” Kraus said.
Kraus and her team have a regularly updated website about their work. For those who want to learn more about their research, they have a short video about their research approach and an online lecture Kraus gave with the Kennedy Center.
Nina Kraus with a piano. “Science is a deeply human endeavor,” she said, “and I think we often forget that. It’s made by people.” Photo courtesy of Kraus and colleague Jenna Cunningham, Ph.D.
Jason Dinh’s research career began unintentionally with a semester at Duke’s Marine Lab. A current fourth-year PhD candidate in Duke’s Biology Department, Dinh ventured to the Marine Lab for a mental reset in the spring of his sophomore year as a Duke undergraduate. “While I was there, I realized that people can just get paid to ask questions about how the world works,” Dinh told me, “And I really didn’t know that was a thing that you could do.” Maybe this is what I want to do, he thought.
Jason Dinh, fourth-year PhD candidate in Duke Biology Department
Dinh spent his remaining undergraduate summers investigating the impacts of soundscapes on oyster and fish larvae development. Now, he studies snapping shrimp – a small oceanic species that is “one of the biggest sound producers in the ocean,” bested only by toothed whales.
Dinh first became aware of snapping shrimp during his undergraduate research. He told me that you can find snapping shrimp “basically anywhere, from the equator up to Virginia or maybe North Carolina.” While conducting research on ocean sounds and oyster and fish larvae, Dinh noticed the frequent snapping sounds of the snapping shrimp when he placed underwater microphones. “We didn’t really know what they were doing,” Dinh said.
An image of a species of snapping shrimp like Dinh works with.
The male snapping shrimp is asymmetrical with one very large claw and one that is regular-sized. The large claw has a tiny hook on the end and when the shrimp clamps down or “snaps” the claw, the top half latches into the bottom, shooting out an air bubble at sixty miles per hour that “essentially boils the water behind it,” producing the loud snapping noise in its wake. When many shrimp are snapping at once, it sounds almost like the frying grease when cooking bacon, Dinh tells me. (Click here to watch a video of the snapping shrimp in action.)
At first, researchers suspected the bubble from the snap was a means of stunning prey, but “It turns out that snapping shrimp also fight each other,” Dinh said. And when fighting, male snapping shrimp shoot the air bubbles at one another. The bigger the shrimp’s body size, the larger the snapping claw and the louder the snapping sound.
An image of two snapping shrimp facing off.
Going into his PhD, Dinh wanted to continue his undergraduate work in acoustics and figure out novel ways animals were producing sounds. His investigation of the snapping shrimp took him in new directions, however. Through his projects, Dinh has conducted work on the costs and benefits that keep the claw size as an honest indicator of shrimp size in competitions and approached a plethora of questions from the physiological and physical mechanisms of sending and assessing snaps, up to the evolutionary implications of the sexual selection for claw size.
“I don’t think I really knew I wanted to do research until right before I applied for grad school,” Dinh said at the beginning of our conversation. He remembers being a child curious about nature and bringing in “hundreds of cicadas” and “random critters into the house.” A few decades later and his research is centered on living creatures, which is both a rewarding and tricky process.
“Live animals are going to do what live animals want to do,” Dinh stated simply. “One thing my advisor always tells us is that you don’t get to tell the animal what to do, it tells you what you are going to do.” This has certainly held true for Dinh. While he has had many detailed and well-planned experimental ideas, he says he’s ultimately ended up doing what the “animals told him they were willing and happy to do in the lab.” However, along the way Dinh basks in the “joys in tiny discoveries in the process of research.”
I asked Dinh how he ended up at Duke in the first place and why he chose to stick around for his PhD. “So I ended up at Duke for undergrad because I really liked basketball, which is a really bad reason to choose a school.” But ultimately, this choice “paid off really well because my first year was the last year we won the National Championship,” Dinh said. He traveled to Indianapolis for the event which he says was the “best basketball game of [his] life.”
Dinh decided to do his PhD at Duke because of how deeply he admires his advisor, Sheila Patek (PhD), as a scientist. “I think she’s just a wonderful, passionate, passionate defender of basic science and just doing science because more knowledge is good for society,” Dinh elaborated, “Sheila’s also a staunch and fearless advocate for her students.” Though Dinh considers himself an “outlier” in the lab – primarily a behavioral ecologist in a lab of researchers investigating biomechanics – the way that Patek approaches science is the way that he wants to approach science as well.
Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, Dinh compares the diving explorations of science as being a “professional rabbit holer.” Science consists of picking questions further and further apart and leaning into research findings to tunnel into topics.
“I feel like science is being a professional rabbit holer,” Dinh stated. While Dinh is on the pursuit of the weapon size and fighting strategies of snapping shrimp, he doesn’t know exactly where he wants to head next, following the completion of his PhD. Like the snapping shrimp that collect information about their opponents to make an informed decision about engaging in fights, Dinh says he is conducting a sort of Bayesian method of his own. He’s assessing his experiences as he goes and sorting out the right next step for him.
A fan of the meditative art of writing, long morning walks with his dog, and reality TV, Dinh appreciates being “on the frontier of what we know” and is sure to let his deep-rooted curiosity about the natural world continue to guide him.
On Friday, February 25th, 2022 the brand-new Duke Space Diplomacy Lab (SDL) had an exciting launch with its first panel event: hosting journalists Ramin Skibba, Loren Grush, and Jeff Foust for a conversation on challenges in space within the next year. Moderated by Benjamin L. Schmitt of Harvard University, the conversation was in line with the SDL’s goals to convene a multidisciplinary group of individuals for the development of research, policy proposals, and solutions to mitigate risks in space.
In conversation, three key themes arose:
U.S Russia Relations
With the current Russian invasion in Ukraine and the subsequent strain on U.S-Russia relations, the geopolitics of space has been in the limelight. Control of outer space has been a contentious issue for the two countries since the Cold War, out of which an uneasy yet necessary alliance was forged. Faust remarked that he doesn’t see U.S-Russia space relations lasting beyond the end of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2030. Grush added that before then, it will be interesting to see whether U.S-Russia relations will sour in the realm of space, simply because it’s questionable whether the ISS could continue without Russian support. However, Russia and NASA have historically acted symbiotically when it comes to space, and it’s unlikely that either party can afford to break ties.
2. Space debris
Major global players, from the U.S to China to India to Russia, are all guilty of generating space debris. Tons of dead satellites and bits of spacecraft equipment litter the areas around Earth – including an estimated 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimeters – and if this debris hit something, it could be disastrous. Grush paints the picture well by comparing spacecrafts to a car on a road – except we just trust that the satellite will maneuver out of the way in the event of a collision, autonomously, and there are absolutely no rules of the road to regulate movement for any other vehicles.
A computer-generated graphic from NASA showing objects in Earth orbit that are currently being tracked. 95% of the objects in this illustration are orbital debris, i.e., not functional satellites.
Skibba suggests that the best thing to do might be to make sure that more stuff doesn’t enter space, since the invention of technologies to clean up existing space debris will take a while. He also points to efforts to program new spacecrafts with graveyard orbit and deorbit capabilities as a necessary step.
3. Who is in charge of space?
Faust explained that commercial space exploration is moving incredibly fast, and legal regulations are struggling to keep up. Tons of companies are planning to launch mega-constellations in the next few years, for reasons that include things like providing higher-speed Internet access – something that we can all benefit from. Yet with new players in space comes the question of: who is in charge of space? The Artemis Accords are the existing rules that govern space at an international level, but they function as an agreement, not law, and with more players in space comes a need for legally binding terms of conduct. But as Grush puts it, “there’s a tension between the nimble, rapid commercial environment and a regulatory environment that wasn’t quite prepared to respond.”
The eight signees of the Artemis Accords
Beyond who rules over space, there’s also the question of decolonizing space. Skibba brings up that amidst a growing number of mega-constellations of satellites being launched, there are key questions being asked about who has access to space, and how we can level the playing field for more countries and companies to enter space exploration.
Space is uncharted territory, and to understand it is no small feat. While science has come incredibly far in terms of technological capabilities in space, it’s clear that we don’t know what we don’t know. But with a more multilateral, global approach to exploring space, we may just be able to go even farther.
Biology professor Sheila Patek remembers when she was an undergraduate, petrified as she waded through the world of academia in search of a research position. Knocking on door after door, Patek promised herself that if she was able to enter that world of research, she was going to change it; she was going to help students find opportunities and shift the rigid, exclusionary culture of academia.
Years later, Professor Patek was able to keep her promise. She created Muser, a website to connect students to research opportunities in an effort “to achieve accessible, transparent, equitable, and multidisciplinary research experiences for students and mentors.”
Patek first began this effort as a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, where she found few efficient pathways for undergraduates to find research opportunities. Patek had grown accustomed to being at UC Berkeley, where they utilized a fully integrated system known as the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program. The University of Massachusetts was more reminiscent of Patek’s own undergrad experience, and it was there that she and her colleagues began working on the first version of Muser’s software. This is the version that she brought with her when she came to Duke.
Here, we’re lucky to have a slew of resources — DukeList, the Undergraduate Research Support Office, Bass Connections — that are intended to help students pursue research. However, Patek says that Muser distinguishes itself by being specifically designed to address the many barriers that still prevent students from pursuing research — from a lack of support and resources to racial and gender biases.
Team Muser: (from left) Sheila Patek, Founder; Sonali Sanjay, Co-Student Leader; Katherine Wang, Co-Student Leader; Theo Cai, Duke Undergrad Muser Director and Nowicki Fellow (Credit: Ben Schelling)
One way Muser does this is by making all initial applications anonymous. Patek mentions studies that have found that things like the race and gender connotation of names have significant influence on who gets a position; for example, when given CVs that are identical except for the gender of the names, faculty are more likely to rate the male CVs higher. From the mentor side of Muser, research leads see students’ personal statements first, then must formally review the applications if they wish to view all the information the student has provided — including their names. Patek notes that it has surprised and perhaps frustrated many mentors, but it’s a feature for the benefit of students; it allows them to first be heard without the preconceptions attached to something like their name.
On the flip side, Muser tries to keep things as transparent as possible for students (although anonymous mentors are in the works). There are set timelines — called “rounds” — in which mentors post positions and students apply then hear back.With most other forums for research like DukeList, students are expected to check in and apply constantly — not even knowing if they will get a response. Muser solves this through these rounds, as well as a unique “star” system: mentors that actually review every application get a gold star, visible to students applying.
So far, over three thousand (3000) undergraduates have used the software, and Patek estimates that in 2021, 20% of Duke undergraduates had, at some point, held a research position thanks to Muser. She also boasts the diversity of research leads that have become involved with Muser; it features professors, graduate students, and lab managers alike as mentors, who represent a better gender and diversity balance than academia as a whole. But as much progress has been made, Patek’s ultimate dream would be for every project in every department to be posted on Muser, available for undergraduates who don’t have to worry about being denied because of bigotry or ignored altogether.
The website used to be called MUSER — an acronym meaning Matching Undergraduates to Science and Engineering Research — but nowadays, it’s known simply as “Muser.” I’ve been told that the rebranding is a play on words, referencing the Muses of Greek and Roman mythology who oversaw the full range of arts and sciences, to represent all thinkers.
The next round of Muser for Summer 2022 research positions opens on February 19. Mentors can post opportunities NOW, until February 18. For more information, visit the website and check out this fantastic article introducing Muser.
“Community engagement” and “health disparities” are some of the most trending terms in healthcare right now, but what are people actually doing about them? On Wednesday, February 2, panelists in healthcare sat down as part of Duke’s Research Week to talk about ways in which they and their organizations were actively addressing health disparities by focusing on communities. (View the session)
Dr. L. Ebony Boulware, professor at the Duke University School of Medicine and director of the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute, set the stage by defining health equity for the vast number of us that might only have read about it in a mission statement or an article but weren’t exactly sure how it was conceptualized. To work towards health equity, she said, means that “everyone has an opportunity to attain their full health potential regardless of any socially defined circumstance.” These circumstances could range from poverty to structural racism, but the main theme was that community engagement is a key player as we think about how best to achieve equity.
Slide taken from Dr. L. Ebony Boulware’s presentation.
COVID-19 is a great example of why health equity matters, as we ponder whether the pandemic could have turned out any different if more people had access to vaccines, personal protective equipment, and the capacity to socially distance. Dr. Michael Cohen-Wolkowiez, a professor of Pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Giselle Corbie-Smith, a professor at the UNC School of Medicine gave a pertinent example of their work addressing the health disparity on our minds right now– access to COVID-19 testing – and the RADx program out of the NIH that is funding work to address this problem.
But even before COVID-19, attaining health equity was a tough goal to address for virtually every country in the world. Health equity isn’t just a nicety, it affects how long we are alive. And while progress in terms of life expectancy differences is improving, much work remains to be done to close the myriad gaps that remain. Dr. Tyson Brown, associate professor of Sociology at Duke, highlighted his research into structural racism to stress the fact that structural racism is toxic for population health and disproportionately affects people of color.
Slide taken from Dr. Tyson Brown’s presentation.
Dr. Schenita Davis Randolph, a registered nurse and professor at the Duke School of Nursing, zoomed in a little to highlight what true community engagement looks like. As part of her lab’s research to improve uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) treatment to address HIV in Black women, they designed an intervention for beauty salons, known to be trusted venues for health promotion in the Black female community. But “how do we use community engagement so it’s not just a checkmark?” This, among other pressing challenges to community engagement in addressing health disparities, is what Dr. Keisha Bentley-Edwards, developmental psychologist and professor at the Duke University School of Medicine, talked about.
As the panel discussion came to a close, a key message emerged. As Dr. Davis remarked, both disparities and the communities that are hurt by them are complex, and so until we take a multi-faceted approach to understanding them, we continue to grasp for the ultimate goal of health equity.
But while these disparities are complex, they are certainly not unsolvable. Dr. Corbie-Smith emphasized that “we have a clear understanding of of how health disparities work.” All that’s left to do is solve them, and Dr. Bentley-Edwards highlights this move from awareness to solutions as a challenge to achieving health equity. Perhaps most significantly, though, it’s important to move from inertia to action. While there are seemingly thousands of ways in which communities in the U.S and around the world face barriers to health access, it’s important to do something – however small. As Dr. Bentley-Edwards concluded, by everyone working within their sphere of influence to close the health equity gap, that sphere becomes bigger and bigger and the gap becomes smaller and smaller.
It’s common for a Pratt engineering student like me to be surrounded by incredible individuals who work hard on their revolutionary projects. I am always in awe when I speak to my peers about their designs and processes.
So, I couldn’t help but talk to sophomore Joanna Peng about her project: LowCostomy.
Rising from the EGR101 class during her freshman year, the project is about building a low-cost colostomy bag — a device that collects excrement outside the patient after they’ve had their colon removed in surgery. Her device is intended for use in under-resourced Sub-Saharan Africa.
“The rates in colorectal cancer are rising in Africa, making this a global health issue,” Peng says. “This is a project to promote health care equality.”
The solution? Multiple plastic bags with recycled cloth and water bottles attached, and a beeswax buffer.
“We had to meet two criteria: it had to be low cost; our max being five cents. And the second criteria was that it had to be environmentally friendly. We decided to make this bag out of recycled materials,” Peng says.
For now, the team’s device has succeeded in all of their testing phases. From using their professor’s dog feces for odor testing, to running around Duke with the device wrapped around them for stability testing, the team now look forward to improving their device and testing procedures.
“We are now looking into clinical testing with the beeswax buffer to see whether or not it truly is comfortable and doesn’t cause other health problems,” Peng explains.
Poster with details of the team’s testing and procedures
Peng’s group have worked long hours on their design, which didn’t go unnoticed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Out of the five prizes they give to university students to continue their research, the NIH awarded Peng and her peers a $15,000 prize for cancer device building. She is planning to use the money on clinical testing to take a step closer to their goal of bringing their device to Africa.
Peng shows an example of the beeswax port buffer (above). The design team of Amy Guan, Alanna Manfredini, Joanna Peng, and Darienne Rogers (L-R).
“All of us are still fiercely passionate about this project, so I’m excited,” Peng says. “There have been very few teams that have gotten this far, so we are in this no-man’s land where we are on our own.”
She and her team continue with their research in their EGR102 class, working diligently so that their ideas can become a reality and help those in need.
Based on the small size of Leti’s skull and on the combination of baby teeth and unerupted adult teeth, researchers estimate that the Homo naledi child would have been 4-6 years old.
Look at the palm of your hand and spread your fingers wide. Now imagine squeezing your body through a gap narrower than the distance between the tip of your thumb and the tip your pinkie finger. Let’s make this a bit worse: the gap is in complete darkness, its walls are rough stone, and all you have is a tiny headlamp. Ok, now that you are there, all you have to do is carefully find and recover dime-sized fragments of an invaluable treasure.
That’s how researchers recovered the first Homo naledi child’s skull ever to be found.
The finding was revealed this week in two papers published in the journal PaleoAnthropology by an international team of 21 researchers.
Homo naledi are possibly our most mysterious long-lost cousins. They are an ancient human relative that lived in what is now South Africa, approximately 350 to 250 thousand years ago. They were first discovered in the Rising Star Cave system in 2013, in a research expedition led by Lee Berger, Professor and chair of Palaeo-Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Exploration of the Deep Human Journey at the University of Witwatersand.
The research team, which includes Steven Churchill, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke, named the child Leti (pronounced Let-e), after the Setswana word “letimela” meaning “the lost one”.
Leti was found in one of the previously unexplored narrow fissures that radiate from Rising Star’s known chambers. His resting site was a 15 cm wide and 80 cm long gap where only the smallest (and bravest) of explorers could fit.
Explorer Becca Peixoto wedges herself between cave rock walls to get to Leti’s skull.
Marina Elliot, lead author of the first paper and one of the explorers to first discover Homo naledi, said in a press conference that excavating Leti’s remains required explorers to wedge themselves practically upside down between two rock walls.
Finding yet another fossil in a prolific site may not seem groundbreaking, but finding a child’s skull is a major achievement. First of all, children’s bones are thin and fragile, and rarely withstand the test of time.
Second, finding a child’s skull gives researchers a precious glimpse into the development of Homo naledi.
“A child’s skull allows us to study how Homo naledi grew and developed, and how their growth rate and schedule compares to other hominid species, and to our own,” Churchill said.
In addition to skull fragments, researchers also recovered two worn baby teeth and four unworn adult teeth that were yet to erupt. These findings show that Leti would have been between four and six years old at the time of her or his death.
Based on similarities between the soil of the fissure where Leti was found and the better-known areas of the cave, Tebogo Makhubela, senior lecturer of Geology at the University of Johannesburg and author of the papers, estimated that Leti has been hidden in Rising Star for over 250,000years.
The discovery of Leti’s skull also deepens the mystery of how Homo naledi’s remains ended up in such a deep, dark, and treacherous cave.
Berger’s team had previously hypothesized that the first 15 Homo naledi individuals found in Rising Star had been disposed there by their own species, as a burial. This hypothesis created an uproar: could a small-brained hominin from over 300,000years ago bury their dead, just like we do?
Leti’s skull was found on a small shelf at the back of the cave’s fissure. No other bones were found, suggesting that Leti’s head may have been deliberately placed there. Leti, as well as all other Homo naledi fossils ever found, showed no evidence of being dragged by predators, carried by water, or tumbled around in any other way.
“Those were social individuals. Seeing one of their own being picked apart by animals could have been very distressing,” Churchill said. “Purposeful disposal of their bodies still seems like the most likely explanation.”
Berger is undeterred by nay-sayers. “This is science,” Berger said at a press conference. “We will continue testing and challenging our hypotheses with every piece of data that we get.”
The researchers hope that other teams around the world will study Leti and other Homo naledi fossils. To that end, Leti’s skull was CT-scanned, and its scans can be downloaded from Morphosource, an open access repository of museum specimens’ 3D scans hosted at Duke University.
Leti will probably not be the last treasure to come out of Rising Star’s spider web of narrow passages.
“I can’t wait to go back to South Africa and see what else is waiting for us in that cave,” said Juliet Brophy, Professor of Geography and Anthropology at Louisiana State University and lead author of the paper describing Leti’s skull.
“This finding makes us remember that exploration is always worth doing,” said Elliot, who is a researcher at Simon Fraser University and Witwatersand University. “There is a lot still out there to be found”.
The Rising Star cave system is known for being extremely dangerous to explore.
Elliot et al. was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Lyda Hill Foundation, the South African National Research Foundation, and the Gauteng Provincial Government, for funding the discovery, recovery and ongoing analyses of the material. Additional support was provided by ARC (DP140104282).
Brophy et al. was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Lyda Hill Foundation, the South African National Research Foundation, the South African Centre for Excellence in Palaeosciences, The University of the Witwatersrand, the Vilas Trust, the Fulbright Scholar Program, Louisiana State University, North Carolina State University, the Texas A&M University College of Liberal Arts Seed Grant program and the Texas A&M College of Liberal Arts Cornerstone Faculty Fellowship.
Citations:
“Expanded Explorations of the Dinaledi Subsystem, Rising Star Cave System, South Africa.” Marina C. Elliot,Tebogo V. Makhubela, Juliet K. Brophy, Steven E. Churchill, Becca Peixoto, Elen M. Feuerriegel, Hannah Morris, Rick Hunter, Steven Tucker, Dirk Van Rooyen, Maropeng Ramalepa, Mathabela Tsikoane,Ashley Kruger, Carl Spander, Jan Kramers, Eric Roberts, Paul H.G.M. Dirks,John Hawks,Lee R. Berger. PaleoAnthropology, November 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48738/2021.iss1.68.
“Immature Hominin Craniodental Remains From a New Localityin the Rising Star Cave System, South Africa.” Juliet K. Brophy, Marina C. Elliot, Darryl J. De Ruiter, Debra R. Bolter, Steven E. Churchill, Christopher S. Walker, John Hawks, Lee Berger. PaleoAnthropology, November 2021, DOI: https://doi.org/10.48738/2021.iss1.64.
A new study investigates why and what they can do about it
Madagascar, famous for its lemurs, is home to almost 26 million people. Despite the cultural and natural riches, Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. Over 70% of Malagasy people are farmers, and food security is a constant challenge. Rice is the most important food crop, but lately an internationally-prized crop has taken center stage: vanilla. Most of the world’s best quality vanilla comes from Madagascar. While most Malagasy farmers live on less than $2 per day, selling vanilla can make some farmers rich beyond their dreams, though these profits come with a price, and a new study illustrates it is not enough to overcome food insecurity.
In a paper published June 25, 2021 in the journal Food Security, a team of scientists collaborating between Duke University and in Madagascar set out to investigate the links between natural resource use, farming practices, socioeconomics, and food security. Their recently published article in the journal Food Security details intricate interactions between household demographics, farming productivity, and the likelihood of experiencing food shortages.
Vanilla beans, Wikimedia Commons
The team interviewed almost 400 people in three remote rural villages in an area known as the SAVA region, an acronym for the four main towns in the region: Sambava, Andapa, Vohemar, and Antalaha. The Duke University Lemur Center has been operating conservation and research activities in the SAVA region for 10 years. By partnering with local scientists, the team was able to fine-tune the way they captured data on farming practices and food security. Both of the Malagasy partners are preparing graduate degrees and expanding their research to lead the next generation of local scientists.
Farmers harvesting the rice fields in Madagascar. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The international research team found that a significant proportion of respondents (up to 76%) reported that they experienced times during which did not have adequate access to food during the previous three years. The most common cause that they reported was small land size; most respondents estimated they owned less than 4 hectares of land (<10 acres), and traditional farming practices including the use of fire to clear the land are reducing yields and leading to widespread erosion. The positive side is that the more productive the farm, especially in terms of rice and vanilla harvests, the lower the probability of food insecurity. There was an interaction between rice and vanilla harvests, such that those farmers that produced the most rice had the lowest probability of food insecurity, even when compared to farmers who grew more vanilla but less rice. Though vanilla can bring in a higher price than rice, there are several factors that make vanilla an unpredictable crop.
The vanilla market is subject to extreme volatility, with prices varying by an order of magnitude from year to year. Vanilla is also a labor- and time-intensive crop; it requires specific growing conditions of soil, humidity, and shade, it takes at least 3 years from planting to the first crop. Without the natural pollinators in its home range of Mexico, Malagasy vanilla requires hand pollination by the farmers, and whole crops can be devastated by natural disasters like disease outbreaks and cyclones. Further, the high price of vanilla brings with it ‘hot spending,’ resulting in cycles of boom and bust for impoverished farmers. Because of the high price, vanilla is often stolen, which leads farmers to spend weeks in their fields guarding the vanilla from thieves before harvesting. It also leads to early harvests, before the vanilla beans have completely ripened, which degrades the quality of the final products and can exacerbate price volatility.
In addition to the effects of farming productivity on the probability of food insecurity, the research revealed that household demographics, specifically the number of people living in the household, had an interactive effect with land size. Those farmers that had larger household sizes (up to 10 in this sample) had a higher probability of experiencing food insecurity than smaller households, but only if they had small landholdings. Those larger families that had larger landholdings had the lowest food insecurity. These trends have been documented in many similar settings, in which larger landholdings require more labor, and family labor is crucial to achieving food sovereignty.
The results have important implications for sustainable development in this system. The team found that greater rice and vanilla productivity can significantly reduce food insecurity. Therefore, a greater emphasis on training in sustainable, and regenerative, practices is necessary. There is momentum in this direction, with new national-level initiatives to improve rice production and increase farmers’ resilience to climate change. Further, many international aid organizations and NGOs operating in Madagascar are already training farmers in new, regenerative agriculture techniques. The Duke Lemur Center is partnering with the local university in the SAVA region to develop extension services in regenerative agriculture techniques that can increase food production while also preserving and even increasing biodiversity. With a grant from the General Mills, the Duke Lemur Center is developing training modules and conducting workshops with over 200 farmers to increase the adoption of regenerative agriculture techniques.
Further, at government levels, improved land tenure and infrastructure for securing land rights is needed because farmers perceive that the greatest cause of food insecurity is their small landholdings. Due to the current land tenure infrastructure, securing deeds and titles to land is largely inaccessible to rural farmers. This can lead to conflicts over land rights, feelings of insecurity, and little motivation to invest in more long-term sustainable farming strategies (e.g., agroforestry). By improving the ability of farmers to secure titles to their land, as well as access agricultural extension services, farmers may be able to increase food security and productivity, as well as increased legal recognition and protection.
To move forward as a global society, we must seek to achieve the United Nation (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of the SDGs is Goal #2, Zero Hunger. There are almost one billion people in the world who do not have adequate access to enough safe and nutritious food. This must change if we expect to develop sustainably in the future. Focusing on some of the hardest cases, Madagascar stands out as a country with high rates of childhood malnutrition, prevalence of anemia, and poverty. This year, more than one million people are negatively impacted by a three-year drought that has resulted in mass famine and a serious need for external aid. Sadly, these tragedies occur in one of the most biodiverse places on earth, where 80-90% of the species are found no where else on earth. This paradox results in a clash between natural resource conservation and human wellbeing.
Achieving the UN’s SDGs will not be easy; in fact, we are falling far short of our targets after the first decade. The next ten years will determine if we meet these goals or not, and our collective actions as a global society will dictate whether we transform our society for a sustainable future or continue with the self-destructive path we have been following. Further research and interventions are still needed to conserve biodiversity and improve human livelihoods.
On Friday, August 2, ten weeks of research by Data+ and Code+ students wrapped up with a poster session in Gross Hall where they flaunted their newly created posters, websites and apps. But they weren’t expecting to flaunt their poetry skills, too!
Data+ is one of the Rhodes Information Initiative programs at Duke. This summer, 83 students addressed 27 projects addressing issues in health, public policy, environment and energy, history, culture, and more. The Duke Research Blog thought we ought to test these interdisciplinary students’ mettle with a challenge: Transforming research into haiku.
Which haiku is your favorite? See all of their finished work below!
Eric Zhang (group members Xiaoqiao Xing and Micalyn Struble not pictured) in “Neuroscience in the Courtroom” Maria Henriquez and Jake Sumner on “Using Machine Learning to Predict Lower Extremity Musculoskeletal Injury Risk for Student Athletes” Samantha Miezio, Ellis Ackerman, and Rodrigo Aruajo in “Durham Evictions: A snapshot of costs, locations, and impacts”Nikhil Kaul, Elise Xia, and Mikaela Johnson on “Invisible Adaptations” Karen Jin, Katherine Cottrell, and Vincent Wang in “Data-driven approaches to illuminate the responses of lakes to multiple stressors”.
By Victoria Wilson, Class of 2023
