Is your memory better than a chimpanzee's?

Slate ran an excerpt from the latest book by Emory primatologist Frans de Waal, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" De Waal describes how animals "keep surprising us" with their intelligence:

"There is the example of Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University, in Japan. I watched Ayumu’s incredibly rapid decision-making on a touch screen the way I admire my students typing 10 times faster than me. In 2007, he managed to put human memory to shame by recalling a series of numbers from 1 through 9. He tapped them in the right order, even though the numbers appeared randomly on the screen and were quickly replaced by white squares. Having memorized the locations of all numbers, Ayumu touched the squares in the right order. Reducing the amount of time the numbers flashed on the screen didn’t bother him in the least, even though humans become less accurate the shorter the interval. Trying the task myself, I was unable to keep track of more than five numbers after staring at the screen for many seconds, while Ayumu did the same after having seen the numbers for just one-fifth of a second—literally the bat of an eye."

Read the full book excerpt at Slate.

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From the field to the Emory Herbarium: How knowledge of nature blooms

Graduate student Daniella Cicka, left, and senior Rina Lee, in the field in South Florida, collect a DNA sample from a plant species.

By Carol Clark

Adam Mackie will never look at a red maple the same way. “Native Americans made an infusion from the tree’s bark to treat gunshot wounds,” says Mackie, a senior majoring in biology. “It was also used to treat bug bites.”

Stachys floridana

Mackie is one of six Emory students who spent a recent alternative spring break in the field in rural South Florida. The students looked for plants used in indigenous medicine in the past, and collected specimens for the Emory Herbarium, under the guidance of medical ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave. They learned to identify endemic plant species in the wild, how to dig deep roots out of the thick mud of a marsh – even how to harvest and cook a swamp cabbage and make a mean guacamole.

"The best part was learning about plants from local people who knew how they were traditionally used," Mackie says.

Florida rancher Bob Brewer spent several days with the students in the field, introducing them to the gopher tortoise, a keystone species, and pointing out plants such as a thorny vine of smilax, which the locals call pipe briar.

We kept pulling and pulling on the stem," Mackie says, "and finally we got to this big tuber. He told us that old-timers used to hollow out these tubers to make pipes for smoking tobacco."

“Plants teach students to be more aware and appreciative of the natural world,” says Quave, a professor in Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology. Quave’s lab researches how traditional uses of plants can inform modern medicine. Interviews with traditional healers in rural Italy, for instance, led to her recent discovery that the leaves of the European chestnut tree contain ingredients with the power to disarm dangerous staph bacteria without boosting its drug resistance.

HERBARIUM NEEDS YOUR GREEN TO GROW

The Emory Herbarium, founded in 1949 by members of the biology department, was closed for decades, and its collection of more than 20,000 specimens was kept in storage. The facility, which recently reopened in the Rollins Research Center, needs $10,000 to help restore and annotate some of its damaged specimens, including rare plants in the Granite Rock Outcrop Collection, which grow in the vernal pools of Arabia Mountain and Stone Mountain. The funds will also support digitizing the specimens so they can be posted online and accessed from around the globe. Check out the Herbarium’s Momentum fundraising campaign to learn how to contribute.

A graduate of Emory herself, Quave found her career path after she went into the Peruvian Amazon as part of a tropical ecology class in the department of environmental sciences.

“When I first get students in the field, they look at a meadow and just see what looks like overgrown grass. It’s like they have blinders on,” Quave says. “Then the blinders come off and they begin to use their ‘plant goggles.’ They start seeing the world in a new way.”

Jennifer Ko, a freshman, grew up in Manhattan and considered herself a city girl. That view was broadened somewhat, as she recounted in a blog post about the trip on the Center for Human Health web site. “I am no longer scared of laying down on the grass and, by the end of the trip, even embraced dirt,” she wrote.

Seniors Jessie Cai and Rina Lee prepare to press an epiphytic air plant from the Bromeliaceae family for deposit in the Emory Herbarium.

Ko also learned to spot and collect specimens such as the frilly white plume of Saururus cernuus (lizard’s tail), deep in a swamp.

“The Choctaw and Creek Indians called this plant ‘widow’s medicine’ because they used it in a tea to help the bereaved get over their loss,” Quave says. She pulls a thick book, “Florida Ethnobotany,” off a shelf in her office to show a picture of widow’s medicine and a flattened sprig of yellow flowers falls out from the pages. “Oh, that’s a neat little Hypericum I collected,” she says, using the Latin name for St. John’s wort.

Ladyfinger bananas

The students rose before dawn and worked 12-hour days while in Florida. They explored scrub pine forests filled with 150-year old trees, still bearing what old-timers call “cat-facing” marks:” V-shapes cut into the bark during the 1800s to harvest turpentine. They took an airboat ride up the Peace River – the habitat of roseate spoonbills, bald eagles, alligators and other wildlife. They squelched in rubber boots through the mucky soil of cypress swamps, in search of species such as the Salyx willow tree, the original source of aspirin.

The group stayed in Quave’s hometown of Arcadia, in the home of her father, Raymond, who runs a business as a heavy equipment operator. “We shopped at a produce stand and bought gorgeous avocados and flats of the freshest, local strawberries to take home and prepare,” Quave says.

Ko cited time spent preparing food as one of the trip highlights. “In my 18 years of life, I never learned to cook,” she wrote in her blog post. “When Dr. Quave watched me struggle even cutting a tomato, she taught me all I needed to know to make my portion of dinner: The guacamole. She taught me the importance of a healthy meal, which is something I never fully understood. During the trip, I was forced to opt for the healthier choices and loved almost every meal I ate.”

Exploring the Peace River by airboat, from left: Cassandra Quave, Jessie Cai, Adam Mackie, Rina Lee, Jennifer Ko and Justin Robeny.

Raymond Quave showed the students how to chop down a swamp cabbage palm and pull the heart of it, then taught them how to boil the heart for their dinner, seasoned with milk, bacon and salt and pepper.

“As an educator I see many extraordinarily bright and talented students who have few outdoor survival skills,” Quave says. “I want them to appreciate the importance of different plants, for the health and sustenance of humans as well as ecosystems.”

The students brought back more than 170 species to add to the Emory Herbarium, which they will also help preserve and annotate.

Capsella bursa-pastoris

“It was an amazing experience,” Mackie said of the Florida trip. “I had worked in the Herbarium and in Dr. Quave’s lab, but that isn’t the same as learning about plants in the field. Now I’m able to grind and preserve some of the dried plant materials that I collected myself.”

Quave, who serves as curator of the Herbarium, spearheaded efforts to reopen it in 2012, after decades of neglect. She recently launched a fundraising campaign to restore some of the specimens and keep the facility in operation (see box, above).

The Herbarium’s original collection manager, Madeline Burbanck, who researched the rare and endangered plants on Georgia granite outcrop ecosystems, played a pivotal role in the official designation of Arabia Mountain as a National Heritage Area.

Tharanga Samarakoon, a plant scientist from Sri Lanka, now serves as the Herbarium’s collections manager, overseeing student volunteers who are working at restoration and digitization efforts.

“The Herbarium is not just a musty room filled with dried plants,” Quave says. “It’s a window into the natural world and a valuable resource for research and education, across disciplines. We need to not only maintain natural habitats, but collect and preserve plant specimens over time, to better understand and monitor ecosystems.”

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Her patient approach to health: Tapping traditional remedies to fight modern super bugs
Chestnut leaves yield extract that disarms deadly bacteria 

Conspicuous consumption may drive fertility down

"As competition becomes more focused on social climbing, as opposed to just putting food on the table, people invest more in material goods and achieving social status, and that affects how many children they have," says anthropologist Paul Hooper.

By Carol Clark

Competition for social status may be an important driver of lower fertility in the modern world, suggests a new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

“The areas were we see the greatest declines in fertility are areas with modern labor markets that have intense competition for jobs and an overwhelming diversity of consumer goods available to signal well-being and social status,” says senior author Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University. “The fact that many countries today have so much social inequality – which makes status competition more intense – may be an important part of the explanation.”

The study authors developed a mathematical model showing that their argument is plausible from a biological point of view.

Across the globe, from the United States to the United Kingdom to India, fertility has gone down as inequality and the cost of achieving social status has gone up. “Our model shows that as competition becomes more focused on social climbing, as opposed to just putting food on the table, people invest more in material goods and achieving social status, and that affects how many children they have,” Hooper says.

Factors such as lower child mortality rates, more access to birth control and the choice to delay childbirth to get a higher education are also associated with declining fertility. “While these factors are very important they are insufficient to explain the drops in family sizes that we are seeing,” Hooper says.

In addition to Hooper, the study authors include anthropologists Mary Shenk, from the University of Missouri, and Hillard Kaplan, from the University of New Mexico. They are pioneers in an emerging field of “computational anthropology,” which blends methods from biology, economics, computer science and physics to answer fundamental questions about human behavior.

The study is featured in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, devoted to how evolutionary approaches can help solve the puzzle of why human fertility varies substantially.

Hooper first became intrigued by variability in human fertility while researching the Tsimane indigenous people of Bolivian Amazonia. The Tsimane (pronounced chee-mahn-AY in Spanish) are foragers and horticulturalists who live in small, isolated communities along the Maniqui River in the Amazonian rainforest.

“In a hunter-gatherer society, parents have a limited number of things available to invest in: Food, clothing and shelter,” Hooper says. “The average Tsimane family has nine children and they can provide these basic needs for all of them.”

Hooper noticed a pattern, however, when Tsimane families leave the rainforest and move closer to Spanish-speaking towns where they come into contact with market economies and industrialized goods. “When they start getting earnings for the first time, they spend money on things you wouldn’t really expect, like an expensive wristwatch or a nylon backpack for a child attending school, instead of sending them with a traditional woven bag,” Hooper says. “I got the impression that these things were largely symbolic of their social status and competence.”

The Tsimane family size also tends to drop when they move closer to town, he adds: From eight or nine children in remote villages, to five or six in villages near town, to three to four in the town itself. 

Hooper hypothesizes that a similar pattern plays out as societies develop from mainly agrarian to more urban and affluent. “In my grandparents day, it took a lot less investment to be respectable,” he says. “It was important to have a set of good clothes for church on Sunday but you could let the kids run around barefoot for the rest of the week.”

Today, however, keeping up with the Jones has become much more complicated – and expensive. 

“The human species is highly social and, as a result, we appear to have an ingrained desire for social standing,” Hooper says. “The problem is that our brains evolved in a radically different environment from that of the modern world. Evolution didn’t necessarily train us very well for the almost infinite size of our communities, the anonymity of many of our interactions and the vast numbers of goods that we can use to signal our status. Our evolved psychology may be misfiring and causing us to over invest in social standing.”

Related:
Amazonian study quantifies key role of grandparents in family nutrition

Image: Thinkstockphoto.com

Atlanta Science Festival fosters 'small steps, big ideas'

Emory faculty and students are set to dazzle children with science demonstrations at "Physics Live!" The event will take place on Friday, March 25 from 3:30 to 7 pm in Emory's Math and Science Building. 

By Carol Clark

"Small steps, big ideas," is the theme of the third annual Atlanta Science Festival, which encourages all ages to step into a world of wonder and exploration through more than 100 events and hands-on activities in metro-Atlanta from March 19 to March 26. In fact, the party has already started via ongoing online activities, such as a chance to vote for Atlanta's favorite scientist and compose original "sci-ku" — or science-themed haiku.

About 50,000 people are expected to turn out during the eight-day festival for talks, lab tours, film screenings, participatory activities and science demonstrations. The events are set at more than 80 different venues, including the Emory campus.

"We've got a lot of fun and irreverent events, like 'The Science of Circus," and others that are more on the serious side, like a discussion on climate change," says Jordan Rose, who is executive co-director of the festival along with Meisa Salaita. "There is something for everyone, from little kids to teens, college students and adults."

A new event this year, "Sci-Cycle: A Competitive Scavenger Hunt on Two Wheels," will start things rolling on the opening day of the festival, Saturday, March 19. The Emory Spokes Council and the Emory Graduate Sustainability Group are organizing the bike adventure, to take place on the Atlanta Beltline. Participants will learn about materials science, urban foraging and sustainable practices through pedaling to various locations and performing tasks such as using a bicycle-powered blender to make a smoothie.

Also new this year is a "Science Parade," set for the final day of the festival, on Saturday, March 26, starting at the Centennial Academy in downtown Atlanta. "Everyone is welcome to join the parade," Rose says. "We're encouraging people to come dressed as their favorite scientist, or element or other science-themed character."

The half-mile parade, led by the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable band, will end at Centennial Olympic Park for the launch of the Exploration Expo, the culminating event of the Atlanta Science Festival. The free Expo includes stage performances and hands-on science activities at 100-plus exhibitor booths, including more than a dozen run by Emory faculty and students.

Highlights of this year's Expo will include a giant LEGO build of the city of Atlanta, which will be 40-feet wide upon completion. "Everyone can help assemble a bit of it throughout the Expo," Rose says.

A range of Atlanta Science Festival events will take place on the Emory and Oxford campuses, as well as the Carter Center.

"The Atlanta Science Festival is a great way to feature some of the research and discoveries that are coming out of Emory for the local community," Rose says. "It's also a great platform for Emory students and faculty to practice their communication skills for a general audience, and to engage the public in their science."

Click here for a full listing of Emory events, and details about how to join them.

A beginner's guide to sex differences in the brain

By Donna Maney, Emory Professor of Psychology

Asking whether there are sex differences in the human brain is a bit like asking whether coffee is good for you – scientists can’t seem to make up their minds about the answer. In 2013, for example, news stories proclaimed differences in the brain so dramatic that men and women “might almost be separate species.” Then in 2015, headlines announced that there are in fact no sex differences in the brain at all. Even as I write this, more findings of differences are coming out.

So which is it? Are there differences between men’s and women’s brains – or not? To clear up the confusion, we need to consider what the term “sex difference” really means in the scientific literature.

To illustrate the concept, I’ve used a web-based tool I helped develop, SexDifference.org, to plot some actual data. The three graphs below show how measurements from a sample of people are distributed along a scale. Women are represented in pink, and men in blue. Most people are close to the average for their sex, so that’s the peak of each “bump.” People on the left or right side of the peak are below or above average, respectively, for their sex. I’ve added individual data points for three hypothetical study subjects Sue, Ann and Bob. Not real people, just examples. Their data points are superimposed on the larger data set of hundreds of people.

Before we get into the brain, let’s look at a couple of familiar sex differences outside the brain. Many of us, if asked to describe how men’s bodies differ from women’s, would first mention the sex difference in external genitalia. The graph below depicts the number of nontransgender adults that have a “genital tubercle derivative” (clitoris or penis) of a given size.

Size of human genitalia. Data from Wallen and Lloyd, 2008. (Graphic by Donna Maney.)

All of the women in this sample, including our hypothetical Sue and Ann, fall within a certain range. All of the men, including Bob, fall into a different range. With relatively rare exceptions, humans can be accurately categorized into sexes based on this measure.

Sex differences in human height. Data from Sperrin, et al., 2015. Graphic by Donna Maney. 

Next, let’s consider another difference that we can all see and understand: the sex difference in height. Here, we see overlap, depicted in purple. Unless a person is very tall or very short, knowing only that person’s height will not allow us to categorize that person as male or female with much certainty. Yet, even though we all know that some women are taller than some men, we would probably all call this a sex difference.

A typical sex difference in the human brain. Data from Tunc et al., 2016. (Graphic by Donna Maney.) 

Now let’s consider a typical sex difference inside the human brain. This graph depicts a sex difference in structural connectivity, or the degree to which networks of brain areas are interconnected, as reported in a recent study (the median effect size from the study is shown). The distributions of values for men and women are essentially the same; they overlap by 90 percent. Sue and Bob have fairly similar values, and Ann’s value is higher than the average man’s. We can see that this sex difference in the brain is quite different from the sex difference in genital measurements. With only the measurement of brain connectivity, the odds of correctly guessing a person’s sex might be as low as 51 out of 100. Since the odds aren’t perfectly 50:50, this is technically a sex difference. The term means that sex explains a portion of the variability in a trait, not that men take one form and women another. There may be a few more women at one end of the range and a few more men at the other, but for the majority, the trait is not that related to sex.

Small differences such as this one are important. The discovery of any sex difference is valuable for scientists and physicians because it points to other, more meaningful sources of variation. Because the sexes differ according to factors such as genes, hormones, and environment, a sex difference in the brain provides clues about the impact of these other factors on the brain. Following up on those clues helps us understand why susceptibility to disease, efficacy of drugs and even the course of normal development are different among all individuals, not just between men and women.

Despite their relevance to human health, the scientific value of sex differences is rarely discussed in the news media. Instead, sex differences become clickbait for promoting stereotypes. Small differences in the brain have been reported to explain a wide variety of presumably sex-typical behaviors, from hunting to cleaning the house. Although it makes intuitive sense that a difference in the brain must translate to a difference in behavior, there is very little evidence linking any sex difference in the human brain directly to a particular function or behavioral outcome. So think twice before you assume that greater brain connectivity confers better multitasking or map-reading skills.

The graphs above are meant to illustrate why it’s not particularly informative to ask a yes-or-no question like “Do the sexes differ?” We need to ask more sophisticated questions: to what extent do the sexes differ? How much do they overlap?

Any decent scientific report of a sex difference contains all of the information needed to answer these questions. But not many journalists look at the actual report; they often rely on press releases, which may misrepresent the nature and meaning of a difference. As a result, the headlines can turn out to be wrong. For example, in the 2013 study reportedly showing that men and women differ profoundly, the sexes overlapped by an average of more than 86 percent. And the 2015 study that supposedly showed no sex differences in the brain? The authors never actually made such a claim. In fact, they provided a long list of bona-fide sex differences.

The next time you read about a sex difference, if you have access to the research report you can graph the difference yourself on SexDifference.org. Enter the average value (reported as the “mean”) and variance (reported as the “standard deviation”) for each sex. The tool will automatically draw a graph and calculate the degree of overlap. You can then see for yourself the extent to which the trait is related to sex.

Don’t be surprised if you can’t find the values you need to graph the difference. The authors may not report them, or they may not have actually compared the sexes. Take, for example, the report last year on thermal comfort in office buildings. The media were aflutter for days, explaining why women are always cold at the office. A quick look at the scientific paper itself shows that there were no men in the study at all! This makes calculating the overlap a bit problematic.

Overlap between the sexes may seem so obvious that it needs no discussion. But its underappreciation is leading educators to separate boys and girls into single-sex classrooms in order to accommodate their different brains, and physicians to consider sex, instead of more relevant factors such as body weight, when prescribing drugs. Although well-intentioned, these practices amount to stereotyping because they assume the distribution looks like the top graph above when it may look more like the bottom one.

Nearly every day, new research is published that, if overinterpreted, could be used to promote sex stereotypes. Most neuroscientists are not interested in doing that. The few neuroscientists who do overinterpret their data, often to the great delight of the media and the public, provide fuel for discriminatory practices and cast the entire field in a negative light. The best way to deal with dubious interpretations is to examine the data and draw our own conclusions. The data will speak for themselves.

This article was first published in The Conversation.

Top image: Thinkstock.com

Beauty and brains: Best-in-breed show dog assists with Emory neuroscience on the side

Emory alum Lindsay Fetters and her best-in-breed winning vizsla, Eli, enjoy their moment at the Westminster Kennel Club. (Photos by Teddy Lei.)

By Carol Clark

The crowd applauded as Atlanta resident and Emory alum Lindsay Fetters, clad in a powder-blue suit dress, dashed into the ring with Eli, a graceful, spirited vizsla with a golden-brown coat. It was the recent Westminster Kennel Club’s best sporting dog competition. Fetters and Eli had just won a best-in-breed event at the show – making Eli the top vizsla in the country. Fresh from this victory, the pair seemed to glow as they glided across the green carpet.

Dog lovers around the country were watching the TV broadcast from Madison Square Garden as the announcer gave a bit of backstory: “Eli’s a participant in the Dog Project at Emory University, which is where dogs go into MRIs fully awake and unrestrained so we can learn a little more about their intellectual and emotional abilities.”

That’s right. While Eli did not take the prize for best sporting dog, he did get a nod for being the only Westminster show dog that assists with neuroscience research in his spare time.

“After we won best in breed and moved on to the sporting event, I had to fill out a card for the announcer to say some unique things about Eli, so I put down the Dog Project,” says Fetters, who is the owner, breeder and handler of Eli. “The general public watches the show and I wanted people to know that these dogs are much more than just pretty faces. Many of these dogs do therapy work and other important things.

Celebrating with a high five

“Also, I love Emory, so I wanted to plug it as much as I could,” adds Fetters, who received her MBA from Goizueta Business School in 2014.

Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns watched the Westminster show from Atlanta. Berns is the director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy and also heads up the Dog Project, which is researching evolutionary questions surrounding humans’ best, and oldest, friend. The project, which began with two dogs and has since expanded to 80, was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. The Dog Project has already identified regions of the canine brain associated with reward and processing faces and scents.

“Lindsay and Eli have been part of the Dog Project almost since the beginning and they have participated in four experiments,” Berns says. “Now that Eli’s won best in breed, I worry that maybe he will be having too much fun fulfilling his stud duties to stay involved in our research.”

Fetters was introduced to dog shows early by her mother, who specialized in Irish setters. “I started showing her Irish setters when I was four years old,” Fetters says.

By the time she was 15, she wanted her own dog to show, and chose the Hungarian vizsla, a medium-sized canine bred for hunting and pointing birds, known for its energy and intelligence. “I named my first vizsla Traitor, because I was cheating on the Irish setters,” Fetters recalls. (Eli, now six-and-a-half-years-old, is the offspring of Traitor.)

While she was still in high school, Fetters began working part-time at a non-profit in Alpharetta called Canine Assistants, which trains service dogs for people with disabilities. She continued working there throughout her undergraduate years at the University of North Georgia, and even after she graduated.

“It was a great job,” Fetters says. “I trained the dogs, and I loved being with them. And then I trained the people how to use the dogs. It was really rewarding to know you were enriching someone’s life. People with disabilities are often used to having a caregiver. But having these dogs makes them a caregiver, in a sense, which is empowering. I saw some people who previously rarely left their house find a sense of purpose when they got the dog. They would start getting up to care for their dog and go for walks and then decide to start school or find a job.”

"It’s hard to explain the feeling of being recognized on a national level with a dog that you raised and trained," Fetters says.

By 2013, Fetters decided that, after 15 years at Canine Assistants, she wanted dogs to just be her passion and not her job. She had already started looking at MBA programs. She was studying for her GMAT at a coffee shop when another customer noticed her Canine Assistants t-shirt and told her about the Dog Project.

“I thought it was really fascinating,” Fetters says. “I like the science behind the Dog Project, and also the challenge of getting a dog to be still in an MRI machine with all the noise and distractions.”

Plus, Eli needed a job, she says. “He’s very task-oriented and needs a lot of interaction. He’s really energetic so staying very still in an MRI is difficult for him but he loves a challenge. He especially likes the treats he gets afterwards.”

During high school and her undergraduate years, Fetters had worked so she wanted to quit her job and devote herself fully to enjoying the student life while getting an MBA. She found her match at the Goizueta one-year MBA program, where she focused on business management.

“When I toured Emory, I knew it was for me,” Fetters says. “I immediately felt at home there: I love the Emory culture and the sense of community, especially within the business school.”

A highlight was her experience in the Gouizeta Advanced Leadership Academy. “For spring break, we went sailing in the British Virgin Islands,” Fetters says. “We worked in teams and were given new challenges every day.” One day she was a navigator and the next day the captain.

“The year at Goizueta changed my whole life,” Fetters says. “I met friends that I will have forever, along with top professors and alumni that I can learn from and call on for advice. It opened my eyes to all the opportunities out there.”

Fetters found a great job as an asset manager at the Goddard Investment Group, a commercial real estate investment firm. Eli is part of the team.

“He goes to work with me every day and sits at my feet in my office,” Fetters says. “My boss is a great dog person and all my co-workers love Eli. He sometimes delivers mail to people because he loves to carry things around. He also enjoys just visiting peoples’ offices to get a treat.”

Every workday, Eli stops in at the convenience store in the office building where the owner gives him a boiled egg. “He doesn’t even have to pay for his egg like everyone else,” Fetters says. “She peels it for him and breaks it into little pieces and hands it to him. His nickname is Prince Eli and he definitely lives up to that.”

When he’s not raising office spirits or assisting in neuroscience, Eli dabbles in acting. Watch for his subtle performances in the Sundance Original TV series, “The Red Road.” Going against type, Eli acted sad while sitting next to a tombstone and afraid as a policeman chased him off a porch.

When they returned to work, Eli and Fetters were greeted with flowers and a party. (Courtesy Lindsay Fetters.)

Eli already had a huge fan base as he set off to compete at the Westminster Kennel Club, the most prestigious dog show in the United States and one of the oldest of any sporting events, now in its 140th year. Fetters and Eli had spent many weekends during the past year competing at dog shows across the country. Eli ranked among the top five vizslas, earning him an invitation to Westminster.

He did not disappoint. “He was kind of a super star the day he won best of breed, happy and outgoing and just wagging his tail the whole time,” Fetters says. “He’s just a heck of a show dog and embodies the ideal vizsla: Light-footed, graceful, smooth and really muscled. He looks like a dog that could go out into the field and hunt all day.”

Fetters is no slacker herself. “Winning best of breed at the Westminster Kennel Club is the thrill of a lifetime, something I’ve dreamt of since I was old enough to watch TV,” she says. “I’m not a professional, but I was showing against professionals in that venue, so to win was a huge honor. It’s hard to explain the feeling of being recognized on a national level with a dog that you raised and trained.”

Fetters’ cell phone and email were soon flooded with messages of congratulations. The Wall Street Journal ran a photo of Eli giving Fetters a high five and the Denver Post ran of a photo of him holding his best-of-breed ribbon.

When Fetters and Eli finally returned to the humdrum work-a-day world of their office, they were greeted with a surprise celebration party.

You will be glad to learn that Eli remains grounded. Yes, he’s in demand for stud services. To Eli, however, sex is not as important as relationships.

“We plan to keep doing the Dog Project,” Fetters says. “Both of us are at our best when we’re busy and interacting with others. And Eli enjoys learning the tasks and getting the attention from the people involved. He’s a little bit of a ham.”

Related:
What is your dog thinking? Brain scans unleash canine secrets
Scent of the familiar: You may linger like perfume in your dog's brain
Dogs process faces in specialized brain area, study reveals

Pioneering work on the causes of crime

"Climate change will impact most of the leading causes of crime," says criminologist Robert Agnew. (Emory Photo/Video)

By April Hunt, Emory Report

Robert Agnew, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Sociology, recently won the American Society of Criminology’s highest honor, the 2015 Edwin H. Sutherland Award, for his pioneering work on the causes of crime. Agnew developed General Strain Theory (GST) — one of the leading explanations of crime and its causes. GST states that certain strains or stressors, such as economic problems and peer abuse, increase the likelihood of crime. These strains create negative emotions, including anger and frustration. Individuals sometimes cope with these strains and negative emotions through crime as a way to reduce or escape from them. Examples include crimes such as theft to obtain money, revenge against the source of strain or related targets (such as assaulting abusive peers), or use and abuse of illicit drugs to alleviate negative emotions.

Agnew, who served as president of the American Society of Criminology in 2012-2013, is currently working on a book exploring the social consequences of climate change, including the effects of climate change on crime.

In this interview, Agnew explains the basics of GST and why climate change is the greatest threat of our time.

What are the major causes of crime in General Strain Theory?

GST does not state that all strains or stressors increase crime, only some do. Those strains most likely to increase crime have several features. Among other things, they are high in magnitude, seen as unjust, associated with low social control, and readily resolved through crime. Let me give an example. Many professors face a good deal of strain; they work long hours, their research papers are rejected, and their grant applications are denied. But these strains typically do not lead to crime, partly because they are associated with high social control. These professors have prestigious jobs and they have worked very hard for a good many years to get these jobs. So they have much to lose by engaging in crime. But other strains do increase the likelihood of crime. These strains include parental rejection, child abuse, abusive peer relations, severe economic problems including chronic unemployment, criminal victimization, homelessness, discrimination and the inability to achieve certain goals. I detail and explain all of these strains in my book, “Pressured Into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory” (Oxford, 2006).

Not everyone who experiences something like a violent childhood or poverty reacts to that strain with crime. Does your research indicate what factors account for this? 

Most people do not cope with strains through crime; they cope in a legal manner. For example, they cope with economic problems by cutting back on expenses, working longer hours or borrowing money from others. Criminal coping is more likely when people lack the ability to cope in a legal manner. For example, they lack problem-solving skills and have no one they can turn to for support. Criminal coping is more likely when the costs of crime are low. For example, people are in environments where the likelihood of being sanctioned for crime is low and they have little to lose if sanctioned. And criminal coping is more likely when people are disposed to crime. For example, they believe that violence is justified if you are insulted, they associate with others who encourage criminal coping, and their personalities are such that they are quick to anger and tend to act without thinking.

You have argued that climate change is likely to become one of the major drivers of crime. How would that work? 

Climate change will impact most of the leading causes of crime. It will increase strain, reduce social control, weaken social support, foster beliefs favorable to crime, contribute to traits conducive to crime, increase certain opportunities for crime, and create social conflict. Climate change will increase exposure to strains, including extreme weather events (such as heat waves, flooding, droughts), food and freshwater shortages, the loss of livelihood, health problems, forced migration, poverty and inequality, and exposure to armed conflict. We are already starting to see many of these effects, and research suggests that these strains will increase the likelihood of crime. I plan to further examine the negative social effects of climate change, including the effects on crime, in a book project. Indeed, I feel a special obligation to do so. I have no doubt that climate change is the greatest threat to confront humanity, with the lives and well-being of billions at stake, especially the poor and those in developing countries.

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Tuvan throat singing gives voice to a unique way of life

On Friday, Emory will host a free performance by the Alash Tuvan throat singers, masters of a unique musical tradition. The trio includes, from left: Ayan-ool Sam, Bady-Dorzhu Ondar and Ayan Shirizhik. 

By Carol Clark

The first time that Emory anthropologist Paul Hooper went to Tuva, in 2013, it didn’t take long to make friends – including members of the famed Tuvan throat-singing ensemble, Alash. The Anthropology department is hosting Alash in a free concert at the Emory Performing Arts Studio on Friday, January 29 at 7 pm.

Hooper had traveled to the small Republic of Tuva in Russia, on the southern edge of Siberia on the border of Mongolia, to research nomadic herding economics. “I drove in over the mountains and started meeting people pretty quickly,” he recalls.

Within a few days, he was invited to a local barbecue on the outskirts of the capital city of Kyzyl. He and other guests mingled by a yurt, in a high mountain landscape of pine and birch forests. “We ate some really delicious goat, roasted over an open fire,” Hooper says, “and washed it down with araga, the local wine, which is fermented cow’s milk that has been distilled into a clear liquid. Araga is also delicious – it tastes like saki with some parmesan cheese melted into it.”

But the best thing about the party was the entertainment by some of the fellow guests, the Alash throat singers. “I was awestruck, having just arrived a few days earlier and here I was meeting the country’s super stars,” Hooper says. “The Alash members perform internationally and they are like ambassadors to the outside world because they’ve traveled much more than most Tuvans.”

They played handmade instruments and emitted low, droning voices that vibrated into high-pitched, harmonic whistling. “It’s incredible because each singer can generate two or three harmonizing tones at once,” Hooper says. “When you have three guys who are doing this together, and they are all masters at it, they create a musical landscape that is almost extraterrestrial in terms of the sensation it gives you. There is nothing like sitting on a high mountain peak and getting to hear Tuvan throat singing.”

Tuva, tucked into the mountains, remained relatively isolated during the era of the Soviet Union. “It was a refuge for this form of folk music that developed separately from other musical traditions and has grown into a fine performance art,” Hooper says. “Throat singing is now Tuva’s biggest export, in a way."

Fans of “The Big Bang Theory” may be familiar with Tuvan throat singing since it’s a hobby of Sheldon Cooper. But Sheldon falls far short of the masters of the art, Alash.

Hooper hosted Alash for an Emory concert once before, during their 2014 U.S. tour, so Friday will be a return performance, and a reunion of friends.

“They’re wonderful guys, incredibly hospitable,” Hooper says of the trio. “They’ve each invited me to stay with their families in yurts in the countryside. I went to Tuva to learn about nomadic herding, but throat singing is such a beautiful, unique tradition, and Alash is so welcoming, that I couldn’t help but get wrapped up in the musical side of the country as well.”

Hope your Halloween is a 'real' scream

Janet Leigh belts one out during the famous shower scene in "Psycho."

Ben Guarino writes about the mysteries of screaming for Inverse. Below is an excerpt:

"We scream when we're excited or happy; we scream when we're fearful or in pain; we scream when we are exasperated; we scream when we're charging into battle; we scream during sex. But we rarely stop to wonder what those screams, even the ones that erupt from us, signify or if they can be differentiated. Emory University psychologist Harold Gouzoules thinks in those terms, but despite being probably the world's foremost expert on screaming, he doesn't speak in absolutes. For decades, Gouzoules studied screams in macaques and other nonhuman primates. He's only worked with Homo sapiens for three years and answers to even the most basic research questions remain elusive."

Read Guarino's interview with Gouzoules in Inverse.

Many species scream, but humans are the masters of the craft, notes Alistair Gee in the New Yorker. Gouzoules "speculates that this is because we humans are more sophisticated communicators in general: if our brains can grasp the fifteen or so cases in the Finnish language, high-level screaming ought to be a breeze."

Read the New Yorker story here.

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The psychology of screams

The secret Maoist Chinese operation that conquered malaria — and won a Nobel

1964 poster: "Prevent Malaria and Take Care of People's Health." Painted by Wu Hao.

By Jia-Chen Fu, Assistant Professor of Chinese at Emory
For The Conversation

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Project 523 – a covert operation launched by the Chinese government and headed by a young Chinese medical researcher by the name of Tu Youyou – discovered what has been the most powerful and effective antimalarial drug therapy to date.

Known in Chinese as qinghaosu and derived from the sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua L.), artemisinin was only one of several hundred substances Tu and her team of researchers culled from Chinese drugs and folk remedies and systematically tested in their search for a treatment to chloroquine-resistant malaria.

How Tu and her team discovered artemisinin tells us much about the continual Chinese effort to negotiate between traditional/modern and indigenous/foreign.

Indeed, contrary to popular assumptions that Maoist China was summarily against science and scientists, the Communist party-state needed the scientific elite for certain political and practical purposes.

Medicine, particularly when it also involved foreign relations, was one such area. In this case, it was the war in Vietnam and the scourge of malaria that led to the organization of Project 523.

North Vietnamese soldiers had to deal with disease as well as the enemy. (Photo via manhhai, CC.)

As fighting escalated between American and Vietnamese forces throughout the 1960s, malaria became the number one affliction compromising Vietnamese soldier health. The increasing number of chloroquine-resistant malaria cases in the civilian population further heightened North Vietnamese concern.

In 1964, the North Vietnamese government approached Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung and asked for Chinese assistance in combating malaria. Mao responded, “Solving your problem is the same as solving our own.”

From the beginning, Project 523, which was classified as a top-secret state mission, was under the direction of military authorities. Although civilian agencies were invited to collaborate in May 1967, military supervision highlighted the urgent nature of the research and protected it from adverse political winds.

The original three-year plan produced by the People’s Liberation Army Research Institute aimed to: "integrate far and near, integrate Chinese and Western medicines, take Chinese drugs as its priority, emphasize innovation, unify plans, divide labor to work together."

Project 523 had three goals: the identification of new drug treatments for fighting chloroquine-resistant malaria, the development of long-term preventative measures against chloroquine-resistant malaria, and the development of mosquito repellents. To achieve these ends, research on Chinese drugs and acupuncture was integral.

Read more in The Conversation.

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Chestnut leaves yield extract that disarms deadly bacteria

Why women rule, and other hot science topics at the Decatur Book Festival

Illustration: Don Morris

Women can forget about equality with men, warns Emory anthropologist Mel Konner.

It’s even better than that. Why should women embrace mere equality when their movement is toward superiority? It is maleness that has Konner worried in his latest book, “Women After All: Sex, Evolution and the End of Male Supremacy,” which looks at the history and future of gender and power dynamics.

Konner will be one of the featured authors in the ever-popular Science track of the Decatur Book Festival this weekend. He’ll take the stage at 3 pm on Saturday, September 5, at the Marriot Conference Center.

The last line of Konner’s book jacket reads: “Provocative and richly informed, ‘Women After All’ is bound to be controversial across the sexes.”

As Konner acknowledges on his personal web site, the first murmurings came about after a short adaptation of the book ran in the Wall Street Journal. Hundreds of angry men responded within a couple of days. His wife, home alone during that period, double-locked the door. Konner’s editor at the Wall Street Journal apologized for failing to instruct him not to read the comments.

For his part, Konner is hiding in plain sight, saying “Clearly, I’ve touched a nerve, and I’m happy about that.”

Konner talks about a future that his grandson will inhabit, a “new world” that “will be better for him because women help run it.”

You can read more about Konner’s book in the latest issue of Emory Magazine.

Another provocative issue at the intersection of science and society is explored in “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationships with Immunization,” by Emory historian Elena Conis. She will discuss her book at 4:15 pm on Saturday at the Marriott Conference Center.

Chestnut leaves yield extract that disarms deadly bacteria

Ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave collecting chestnut leaf specimens in the field in Italy. Photo by Marco Caputo.

By Carol Clark

Leaves of the European chestnut tree contain ingredients with the power to disarm dangerous staph bacteria without boosting its drug resistance, scientists have found.

PLOS ONE is publishing the study of a chestnut leaf extract, rich in ursene and oleanene derivatives, that blocks Staphlococcus aureus virulence and pathogenesis without detectable resistance.

The use of chestnut leaves in traditional folk remedies inspired the research, led by Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University. “We’ve identified a family of compounds from this plant that have an interesting medicinal mechanism,” Quave says. “Rather than killing staph, this botanical extract works by taking away staph’s weapons, essentially shutting off the ability of the bacteria to create toxins that cause tissue damage. In other words, it takes the teeth out of the bacteria’s bite.” 

The discovery holds potential for new ways to both treat and prevent infections of methicillin-resistant S. aureus, or MRSA, without fueling the growing problem of drug-resistant pathogens. 

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria annually cause at least two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. MRSA infections lead to everything from mild skin irritations to fatalities. Evolving strains of this “super bug” bacterium pose threats to both hospital patients with compromised immune systems and young, healthy athletes and others who are in close physical contact.

Quave researches the interactions of people and plants – a specialty known as ethnobotany.

“We’ve demonstrated in the lab that our extract disarms even the hyper-virulent MRSA strains capable of causing serious infections in healthy athletes,” Quave says. “At the same time, the extract doesn’t disturb the normal, healthy bacteria on human skin. It’s all about restoring balance.”

Quave, who researches the interactions of people and plants – a specialty known as ethnobotany – is on the faculty of Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health and Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology. She became interested in ethnobotany as an undergraduate at Emory. 

For years, she and her colleagues have researched the traditional remedies of rural people in Southern Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. “I felt strongly that people who dismissed traditional healing plants as medicine because the plants don’t kill a pathogen were not asking the right questions,” she says. “What if these plants play some other role in fighting a disease?”

Hundreds of field interviews guided her to the European chestnut tree, Castanea sativa. “Local people and healers repeatedly told us how they would make a tea from the leaves of the chestnut tree and wash their skin with it to treat skin infections and inflammations,” Quave says.

For the current study, Quave teamed up with Alexander Horswill, a microbiologist at the University of Iowa whose lab focuses on creating tools for use in drug discovery, such as glow-in-the-dark staph strains.

The researchers steeped chestnut leaves in solvents to extract their chemical ingredients. “You separate the complex mixture of chemicals found in the extract into smaller batches with fewer chemical ingredients, test the results, and keep honing in on the ingredients that are the most active,” Quave explains. “It’s a methodical process and takes a lot of hours at the bench. Emory undergraduates did much of the work to gain experience in chemical separation techniques.”

The work produced an extract of 94 chemicals, of which ursene and oleanene based compounds are the most active.

Tests showed that this extract inhibits the ability of staph bacteria to communicate with one another, a process known as quorum sensing. MRSA uses this quorum-sensing signaling system to manufacture toxins and ramp up its virulence.

“We were able to trace out the pathways in the lab, showing how our botanical extract blocks quorum sensing and turns off toxin production entirely,” Quave says. “Many pharmaceutical companies are working on the development of monoclonal antibodies that target just one toxin. This is more exciting because we’ve shown that with this extract, we can turn off an entire cascade responsible for producing a variety of different toxins.”

A single dose of the extract, at 50 micrograms, cleared up MRSA skin lesions in lab mice, stopping tissue damage and red blood cell damage. The extract does not lose activity, or become resistant, even after two weeks of repeated exposure. And tests on human skin cells in a lab dish showed that the botanical extract does not harm the skin cells, or the normal skin micro-flora.

The Emory Office of Technology Transfer has filed a patent for the discovery of the unique properties of the botanical extract.

The researchers are doing further testing on individual components of the extract to determine if they work best in combination or alone. “We now have a mixture that works,” Quave says. “Our goal is to further refine it into a simpler compound that would be eligible for FDA consideration as a therapeutic agent.”

Potential uses include a preventative spray for football pads or other athletic equipment; preventative coatings for medical devices and products such as tampons that offer favorable environments for the growth of MRSA; and as a treatment for MRSA infections, perhaps in combination with antibiotics.

“It’s easy to dismiss traditional remedies as old wives’ tales, just because they don’t attack and kill pathogens,” Quave says. “But there are many more ways to help cure infections, and we need to focus on them in the era of drug-resistant bacteria.”

The research was funded by the NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. In addition to Quave and Horswill, the study’s authors include: Emory researchers James Lyles and Kate Nelson; and Jeffery Kavanaugh, Corey Parlet, Heidi Crosby and Kristopher Heilmann from the University of Iowa.

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Marks on 3.4-million-year-old bones not due to trampling, analysis confirms

Detail of the marks on a fossilized rib bone, one of the two controversial bones. “The best match we have for the marks, using currently available data, would still be butchery with stone tools," says anthropologist Jessica Thompson. Photo by Zeresenay Alemseged.

By Carol Clark

Marks on two 3.4 million-year-old animal bones found at the site of Dikika, Ethiopia, were not caused by trampling, an extensive statistical analysis confirms. The Journal of Human Evolution published the results of the study, which developed new methods of fieldwork and analysis for researchers exploring the origins of tool making and meat eating in our ancestors.

“Our analysis clearly shows that the marks on these bones are not characteristic of trampling,” says Jessica Thompson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Emory University and lead author of the study. “The best match we have for the marks, using currently available data, would still be butchery with stone tools.”

The 12 marks on the two specimens – a long bone from a creature the size of a medium antelope and a rib bone from an animal closer in size to a buffalo – most closely resemble a combination of purposeful cutting and percussion marks, Thompson says. “When these bones were hit, they were hit with enormous force and multiple times.”

The paper supports the original interpretation that the damage to the two bones is characteristic of stone tool butchery, published in Nature in 2010. That finding was sensational, since it potentially pushed back evidence for the use of stone tools, as well as the butchering of large animals, by about 800,000 years.

The Nature paper was followed in 2011 by a rebuttal in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggesting that the bones were marked by incidental trampling in abrasive sediments. That sparked a series of debates about the significance of the discovery and whether the bones had been trampled.

Anthropologist Jessica Thompson at work in the field in Africa. She specializes in the study of what happens to bones after an animal dies.

For the current paper, Thompson and her co-authors examined the surfaces of a sample of more than 4000 other bones from the same deposits. They then used statistical methods to compare more than 450 marks found on those bones to experimental trampling marks and to the marks on the two controversial specimens.

“We would really like to understand what caused these marks,” Thompson says. “One of the most important questions in human evolution is when did we start eating meat, since meat is considered a likely explanation for how we fed the evolution of our big brains.”

Evidence shows that our genus, Homo, emerged around 2.8 million years ago. Until recently, the earliest known stone tools were 2.6 million years old. Changes had already been occurring in the organization of the brains of the human lineage, but after this time there was also an increase in overall brain size. This increased size has largely been attributed to a higher quality diet.

While some other apes are known to occasionally hunt and eat animals smaller than themselves, they do not hunt or eat larger animals that store abundant deposits of fat in the marrow of their long bones. A leading hypothesis in paleo-anthropology is that a diet rich in animal protein combined with marrow fat provided the energy needed to fuel the larger human brain.

The animal bones in the Dikika site, however, have been reliably dated to long before Homo emerged. They are from the same sediments and only slightly older than the 3.3-million-year-old fossils unearthed from Dikika belonging to the hominid species Australopithecus afarensis.

Thompson specializes in the study of what happens to bones after an animal dies. “Fossil bones can tell you stories, if you know how to interpret them,” she says.

A whole ecosystem of animals, insects, fungus and tree roots modify bones. Did they get buried quickly? Or were they exposed to the sun for a while? Were they gnawed by a rodent or chomped by a crocodile? Were they trampled on sandy soil or rocky ground? Or were they purposely cut, pounded or scraped with a tool of some kind?

"Fossil bones can tell you stories, if you know how to interpret them," Jessica Thompson says. For instance, the marks on this fossilized bone from the Dikika site are diagnostic of punctures made by crocodile teeth. Photo by Jessica Thompson.

One way that experimental archeologists learn to interpret marks on fossil bones is by modifying modern-day bones. They hit bones with hammer stones, feed them to carnivores and trample them on various substrates, then study the results.

Based on knowledge from such experiments, Thompson was one of three specialists who diagnosed the marks on the two bones from Dikika as butchery in a blind test, before being told the age of the fossils or their origin.

The PNAS rebuttal paper, however, also used experimental methods and came to the conclusion that the marks were characteristic of trampling.

Thompson realized that data from a larger sample of fossils were needed to chip away at the mystery.

The current paper investigated with microscopic scrutiny all non-hominin fossils collected from the Hadar Formation at Dikika. The researchers collected a random sample of fossils from the same deposits as the controversial specimens, as well as nearby deposits. They measured shapes and sizes of marks on the fossil bones. Then they compared the characteristics of the fossil marks statistically to the experimental marks reported in the PNAS rebuttal paper as being typical of trampling damage. They also investigated the angularity of sand grains at the site and found that they were rounded – not the angular type that might produce striations on a trampled bone.

“The random population sample of the fossils provides context,” Thompson says. “The marks on the two bones in question don’t look like other marks common on the landscape. The marks are bigger, and they have different characteristics.”

Trample marks tend to be shallow, sinuous or curvy. Purposeful cuts from a tool tend to be straight and create a narrow V-shaped groove, while a tooth tends to make a U-shaped groove. The study measured and quantified such damage to modern-day bones for comparison to the fossilized ones.

“Our analysis shows with statistical certainty that the marks on the two bones in question were not caused by trampling,” Thompson says. “While there is abundant evidence that other bones at the site were damaged by trampling, these two bones are outliers. The marks on them still more closely resemble marks made by butchering.”

One hypothesis is that butchering large animals with tools occurred during that time period, but that it was an exceedingly rare behavior. Another possibility is that more evidence is out there, but no one has been looking for it because they have not expected to find it at a time period this early.

The Dikika specimens represent a turning point in paleoanthropology, Thompson says. “If we want to understand when and how our ancestors started eating meat and moving into that ecological niche, we need to refine our search images for the field and apply these new recovery and analytical methods. We hope other researchers will use our work as a recipe to go out and systematically collect samples from other sites for comparison.”

In addition to Dikika, other recent finds are shaking up long held views of hominin evolution and when typical human behaviors emerged. This year, a team led by archeologist Sonia Harmand in Kenya reported unearthing stone tools that have been reliably dated to 3.3 million years ago, or 700,000 years older than the previous record.

“We know that simple stone tools are not unique to humans,” Thompson says. “The making of more complex tools, designed for more complex uses, may be uniquely human.”

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Complex cognition shaped the Stone Age hand axe, study shows
Brain trumps hand in Stone Age tool study