Clare Fieseler wants to teach grad students how to make short films explaining their science.
Duke students apparently really care about improving graduate education in the STEM fields (science, technology engineering and math). Two Duke projects have been named winners in a National Science Foundation contest to develop ideas to do just that.
The Innovation in Graduate Education Challenge, invited graduate students to submit ideas with the potential to improve graduate education and professional development. Ideas could be oriented to students, faculty, departments, institutions, professional societies, and/or federal agencies.
Second place and a $2,000 prize went to “The Scientists with Stories Project,” founded by Clare Fieseler, a 2010 masters graduate from Duke who is now a PhD student in Ecology at Chapel Hill. Grad students on both campuses designed and conducted a 6-day workshop on storytelling and video skills in 2010 which resulted in short films about their science — several of which have won awards at festivals. The model of giving grad students the tools to communicate with the general public is one Fieseler thinks can be spread to other campuses.
David McDonald would like to see professional development modules added to the grad school experience.
Third place and a $1,500 prize went to Duke Genetics & Genomics PhD student David McDonald for his proposed professional development curriculum that includes mentors and modular classes to help students learn about grant writing, mentoring, lab budgets and service and outreach while they’re pursuing their scientific training. He calls it “Creating a Cooperative Environment for Graduate Studies and Career Preparation.”
More than 500 proposals were submitted to the NSF and eight prizes were awarded. Did we mention that two of them were from Duke?
Learn more about these students and their projects.
Gregg Gunnell directs the fossil primate division of the Duke Lemur Center.
By Karl Leif Bates
A newly discovered 25 million-year-old monkey fossil has been named for Gregg Gunnell, director of the Duke Lemur Center’s Division of Fossil Primates.
The thing is, Nsungwepithecus gunnelli, might turn out to be a pig. “It might be a ‘porky-pithecus,’ ” Gunnell said with a laugh. ”Early monkeys and early pigs looked remarkably alike.”
The fossil, from southwestern Tanzania, consists of a single molar. But it displays nine characteristics that would distinguish it from other Old World monkeys, according to Nancy Stevens, a paleontologist at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio who was the lead author on a paper about the discovery in Nature.
Gunnell’s monkey was found at a site in the Rukwa Rift Basin along with another new monkey fossil, Rukwapithecus fleaglei, for which scientists have a jaw and three teeth. It too has nine distinguishing features.
An artist’s conception of the two newly named 25.2 million year old fossil monkeys described in Nature. Gregg Gunnell is the guy on the right. (credit: Mauricio Anton)
Gunnell said Stevens named the monkey after him to honor his role in helping her become a paleontologist. When Stevens was an undergraduate at Michigan State University, and Gunnell worked in the museum at the University of Michigan, he took Stevens and her now-husband and co-author Patrick O’Connor along on archaeological digs in Wyoming. Apparently the lessons stuck.
N. gunnelli is actually Gunnell’s third species. He was earlier honored by the naming of a bat and an extinct tillodont, which was, he reluctantly explains, a rather pig-like little animal.
“I’m hoping that this pig really is a monkey — that’ll improve my self-image,” he said.
One of the researchers displays the right hand of the adult female called MH2. Her arm is complete from fingers to shoulder blade and collar bone. Credit: University of Witwatersrand.
By Karl Leif Bates
Followers of the saga of human evolution are in for a treat later this week.
Duke’s Steven Churchill and an international team of colleagues will soon publish the second wave of papers from their analysis of two South African specimens called Australopithecus sediba.
We can’t tell you the details of what’s in the papers just yet because of the journal’s embargo policy, but trust us — it’s pretty cool!
UPDATE 4/12/2013 — The embargo has lifted, so details of the findings and a recorded interview with two of the scientists can be found on the Duke Research site. END UPDATE
At 2 p.m. on Thursday 4/11, you can tune into a Google+ Hangout to hear Churchill and Boston University’s Jeremy DeSilva describe the latest findings and ask your own questions.
This latest round of analysis goes deeper into several areas of the anatomy of the two spectacularly complete A. sediba specimens and turns up some surprises.
This blog will also have a more complete report, going live right around that time, so come on back.
Two of Churchill’s former undergrad students, 2012 graduates Tawnee Sparling and Kelly Ostrofsky, are among the authors on the new papers. You can hear them talk about their work in this video.
The story of how scientists discovered the two specimens is pretty cool too — CBS Sixty Minutes did a segment on that a couple of years ago. View it here.
And here’s Churchill in a Sept., 2011 segment describing what the specimens are and what they might represent.
Guest Post by Robin A. Smith, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent)
A male peacock roosting at the top of a tree in India at dusk. (Jessica Yorzinski photo)
Deep in the scrublands of Keoladeo National Park in northwest India, one thing was hard for biologist Jessica Yorzinski to ignore: It wasn’t the heat. It wasn’t the jackals. It was the squawks of peacocks in the throes of passion.
From behind the trees in the distance, she could hear a loud two-part whoop, the distinctive call that male peacocks make right before mating.
During the peacock courtship dance, a male announces that he’s ready to make his move by dashing towards the object of his affection and emitting a singular squawk before mounting his mate.
“Peacocks have a number of different courtship calls, but this is the only one specifically associated with the moment before copulation, a time when the female is finally right in front of the male. It’s called the hoot-dash display,” said Yorzinski, who is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke.
The amorous peacock’s signature hoot poses a puzzle for scientists. For one thing, he’s already got the girl. “By that point she’s already right there, checking him out. You’d think that he might not need another signal at such a late stage in the courtship process,” Yorzinski said.
What’s more, the calls could alert potential predators to an easy meal. Jackals, tigers and hawks can make a quick snack of a wild peacock in their native habitat of South Asia. “In a sense, they’re advertising that they’re distracted and vulnerable. It would be wise for a predator to capitalize on that,” Yorzinski said.
Yorzinski on stakeout inside a blind on a day hotter than 100 degrees F. (courtesy of Jessica Yorzinski)
Intrigued, Yorzinski recorded the loud carrying-on of males in mid-conquest. Then she played the calls to free-ranging females in India and videotaped their reactions. At each site, a loudspeaker played copulation calls on one day and silent controls on another day.
The result: the recorded love sounds made by amorous peacocks in the throes of passion drew eavesdropping females from afar. Females approached and spent more time near speakers that were playing hoots compared to silent controls.
To make sure the birds weren’t simply drawn to any noise, Yorzinski repeated a similar experiment with captive birds in an outdoor enclosure at Duke. There, a speaker played two different sounds: peacock copulation calls, or crow caws.
The results matched what she found in the wild. Captive females paid little attention to the speakers when crow caws were playing, but when the love whoops were played, the females moved toward the source of sound and spent more time near the speaker.
“Why they’re attracted to these calls and what it tells them — these are still open questions,” Yorzinski said.
Announcing the fact that he’s getting a girl could help a male attract additional mates, she explained.
Studies in other species have shown that females flock towards popular males. “It’s like someone’s already vouched for him. If he’s good enough for one girl, then he might be good enough for another girl, too.”
That dating boost could make up for the risks involved in disclosing his whereabouts to potential predators, especially in the birds’ native habitat where dense trees and grasses make strutting males hard for females to spot.
If distant females are drawn to the love calls made by mating males, why don’t the males simply boost their call rate to give the impression that they’re more successful than they actually are?
“One of the biggest unanswered questions is why males don’t fake it,” Yorzinski said. “I’ve heard males making false calls when there’s no mate in sight, so there definitely is some level of cheating going on. Figuring out why they don’t do it more often would be the key.”
But first, he has to visit President Obama at the White House, say a few words at the Swedish embassy, and do about a half-million other photo ops.
“It has been even more intense than I expected,” Lefkowitz said in a hurried conversation on Tuesday.
His Nov. 29 visit to DC will be “an amazingly intense day,” starting with a symposium and Q&A session at the Swedish embassy, followed by a 45-minute visit with the President and other American laureates in the Oval Office, then a reception at Blair House and maybe a trip to Capitol Hill. He’s been invited anyway; he ‘s not sure he can go. Then it’s back to the embassy for a black tie dinner where he is to give remarks before 130 people or so, including Senators, members of the US Supreme Court and other Washington A-Listers.
Friday it’s back to campus, where Lefkowitz speaks to the Duke University Board of Trustees meeting in the morning and then joins the board for a social event at Hart House in the evening. Saturday, his synagogue honors him. Sunday he packs.
“And then Stockholm? Fuhgeddaboudit.”
Guests raise a toast to Alfred Nobel at the 2011 banquet. (Nobel Foundation 2011)
Lefkowitz’s sojourn in the Swedish capitol includes a whole week of Nobel Festival events leading up to the Monday, Dec. 10 award ceremony. Among other things, he is to give a formal half-hour lecture for posterity and visit a local high school. There’s also the matter of a 5-minute toast at a white-tie dinner with the King of Sweden, which his co-laureate Brian Kobilka was only too glad to let him handle.
“They said 3 minutes, but I watched 15 of them online and the mean was 5 minutes. So mine is 4:45.”
On Monday, Dec. 10 — the 116th anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death — Lefkowitz will formally receive the medallion, a certificate, and “a document confirming the Nobel Prize amount” with his colleague and former student Kobilka in a white-tie and tails ceremony in the lavish Stockholm Concert Hall.
The Swedish Royal Family: (left to right) Queen Silvia, King Carl XVI Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria, Prince Carl Philip and Prince Daniel. (Nobel Foundation 2011)
Laureates each receive only 14 tickets to this event, which is fewer than Lefkowitz has family members, unfortunately. But even though they can’t get tickets, many Lefkowitz and Kobilka alumni from all over also will be coming to Stockholm, just to be close to it. They’ll have their own reception elsewhere during the week, Lefkowitz said. And then on Dec. 11, there’s yet another white-tie dinner with the King and Queen — in the royal palace this time.
WHERE TO SEE IT
If you weren’t one of the lucky 14 people to get a ticket from Bob, Duke is hosting a viewing party for the live webcast of the Nobel ceremony from10:30 a.m. to Noon on Monday, Dec. 10. in Schiciano Auditorium A&B. (White tie and tails are optional.)
You can also tune in wherever you might be that morning at http://nobelprize.org. The prize committee has not decided yet whether the 90-minute Nobel Banquet Highlights program will be made available on the web. It will be broadcast on Swedish television.
When a chemist whisks cake batter, he’s not just thinking about the deliciousness that awaits. Whisking can actually induce chemical reactions integral to the texture of the dessert.
In a class being taught next term, Patrick Charbonneau, assistant professor of chemistry and physics, will help students apply science to creating edible masterpieces. For example, they will make two traditional Quebec desserts as an experiment in phase transitions. The ingredients in both are essentially the same, Charbonneau said, but one requires whisking while the other rests as it cools.
Students will measure the stiffness of marshmallows using chocolate bars, maybe it will end in a gooey s’more.
“By whisking you actually induce micro-crystallization and in the other one you remain in the glass phase, so the texture is completely different,” he said. “They’re going to be cooking—these are real desserts and real recipes—but the science is very controlled.”
Charbonneau works in a sub-discipline of chemistry called “soft matter,” but this doesn’t just mean marshmallows. The subject combines aspects of chemistry, physics, chemical engineering and material sciences—and fits perfectly with the science of cooking.
“The demos [in the class] are centered on food, so one of the cool ones is this material properties experiment measuring the [stiffness] of marshmallows using a chocolate bar,” Charbonneau said. “The chocolate bars are calibrated—you know their weight—and you just need a ruler to measure how much the marshmallow compresses.”
Although Charbonneau usually teaches an advanced physical chemistry course, he said he rediscovered old cuisine—and the science behind it—with the help of his friend from college and chef Justine de Valicourt, who is a visiting artist at Duke. De Valicourt has an undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences, but opted for culinary school rather than medical school. She will teach the cooking components of the seminar.
The class will meet once a week in spring semester for two and a half hours, with the first half dedicated to theory and food-centric demos, followed by cooking experiments and a dinner run by de Valicourt.
While cooking may make science more appealing to the non-scientists at Duke, Charbonneau said a basic understanding of chemistry is required in order to discuss the material in detail.
“Sure there’s the detailed chemical reaction when you’re browning something, but browning is not the entire thing,” he said. “There are some structural issues, and taste is something that is much more complicated than just a chemical that touches a receptor—there’s a texture, there’s a look.”
Since there is limited space in the kitchen—and thus limited space in the class—Charbonneau said he hopes he can make the topic more accessible to the Duke community through de Valicourt’s office hours and a final banquet.
“The students from the class will help with the cooking and serving of the banquet,” he said. “It’s the chef’s job to be able to teach them (how to cook properly) and to supervise them, so that should be fun. Hopefully we’ll be able to reach as many people as possible. We got amazing support from everybody in the administration that we talked to. I’m very grateful.”
Since bringing together a chef, a chemist and class space took a “special alignment of the planets to make it happen,” the class—which is being taught for the first time in the spring—may also be its only run.
“The chef is here for a semester, and I would never have dared—because I’m a theorist—to do a thing like this without her or the TA’s,” Charbonneau said. “I do hope though that some of the material we’ve built up will be able to be used as a special topic in general chemistry. I would like to have a module where I would be able to reuse the demonstrations and the content, and maybe even bring in a local chef at that point who would be interested. That’s one way to project it in the future.”
For those interested, the course is called Chemistry and Physics of Cooking, listed as Chem 89.
“It’s listed under chemistry, but it’s really about chemistry and physics,” Charbonneau said. “We’re looking at more physical chemistry—physics processes, denaturing of proteins. We’re also looking at the material science idea, such as viscosity, elasticity—viscoelastic moments, which chemists would never talk about… in a general chemistry class.”
Guest post by Pender M. McCarter, Trinity College (1968), Senior Public Relations Counselor, IEEE-USA/Washington
A scene from the movie “Codebreaker” about the life of Alan Turing.
Alan Turing has been hailed as a digital Darwin, an Einstein and a Newton who helped to “catapult civilization in to the digital age.” The British mathematician laid the groundwork for everything we do with computers today, according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The Turing Machine incorporated all the basic aspects of computer input and output. His 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” posited that computers can be programmed to mimic human behavior. And at the end of his life, Turing wrote about pattern formation in biology, what he called morphogenesis, that could be observed in animal stripes and spirals and even exist in ecosystems and galaxies. Turing is best known for leading the British Bletchley Park code breakers team that cracked Germany’s Naval Enigma Code, helped end World War II, and saved perhaps millions of lives.
Yet until recently Turing’s contributions have been little known or appreciated outside of the sci-tech community. And his personal life as a gay man has generally been glossed over. In 2012, the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, hundreds of events have been held worldwide. A new film, Codebreaker, presents Turing’s personal and professional life without flinching, including how his sexual nature contributed to his extraordinary achievements and tragic downfall.
The drama documentary emphasizes that the support and encouragement Turing enjoyed with other eccentric and brilliant technologists at Bletchley Park motivated and sustained him. When he lost this community after World War II, at a time when there was a craving for normalcy and scant tolerance for non-conformists, Turing learned how unforgiving the world could be.
The drama scenes in Codebreaker center on the psychotherapy sessions Turing participated in during the last 18 months of his life. In these final months, Turing faced persecution as a gay man under the same 19th century British laws that were used to prosecute Oscar Wilde. In 1954, at the age of 41, Turing committed suicide leaving us to wonder about potential future accomplishments in a more accepting and tolerant time. In 2009, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized posthumously to Turing: “We’re sorry; you deserved so much better.”
Codebreaker will be screened at the Duke Center for LGBT Life (02 West Union Building) on Monday, Oct. 29, from 7-8:30 p.m., with underwriting from IEEE-USA, the Washington-based office of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology. The drama documentary will be introduced by Executive Producer Patrick Sammon, who will also answer questions about the film.
Here’s a link to the trailer: http://www.turingfilm.com/
2011 People's Choice "Cold Atom Cloud," by Yinghi Zhang - Duke Graduate Student in Physics
Nearly 5 years after the tragic death of engineering graduate student Abhijit Mahato, the Duke community will once again honor his memory with a photography and visualization contest.
This year’s awards ceremony and exhibit of entries will be Nov. 7 at 5 p.m. in Schiciano Auditorium. The keynote speaker at this year’s event will be Kellar Autumn, professor and chair of biology at Lewis & Clark College, who led a research team that discovered the trick gecko feet use to stick to any surface without an adhesive.
The first two contests produced a spectacular collection of beautiful images from scientific research to exotic locations to mundane objects like lightbulbs and jelly glasses viewed in startling new ways.
