Mystery of monarch migration takes new turn

Sun beams light the wings of monarchs resting in a tree in Mexico. Photo by Jaap de Roode.

By Carol Clark

During the fall, hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies living in eastern North America fly up to 1,500 miles to the volcanic forests of Mexico to spend the winter, while monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains fly to the California coast. The phenomenon is both spectacular and mysterious: How do the insects learn these particular routes and why do they stick to them?

A prevailing theory contends that eastern and western monarchs are genetically distinct, and that genetic mechanisms trigger their divergent migratory paths.

An analysis led by Emory University biologists, however, finds that the two groups of monarchs are genetically mixed. Their research, published in the journal Molecular Ecology, suggests that environmental factors may be the key to the butterflies’ choice of winter homes, and to where they wind up in the spring.

Fluttering monarchs fill the sky over Mexico. Photo by Jaap de Roode.

“Our data gives the strongest signal yet that the eastern and western monarchs belong to a single genetic population,” says Emory biologist Jaap de Roode, who led the research. “This distinction is important to help us better understand the behavior of the organism, and to conserve the monarch flyways.”

In addition to researchers in the de Roode lab, the study involved a scientist from the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich, Switzerland.

Biologists have long been fascinated by the innate and learned behaviors underlying animal migrations. When monarchs are breeding, for instance, they can live up to four weeks, but when they are migrating, they can live as long as six months.

“As the day length gets shorter, their sexual organs do not fully mature and they don’t put energy into reproduction. That enables them to fly long distances to warmer zones, and survive the winter,” de Roode says. “It’s one of the basic lessons in biology: Reproduction is very costly, and if you don’t use it, you can live much longer.”

Watch a YouTube video of monarchs gathering in Mexico, narrated in Spanish by Mexican actor Alan Estrada:


Mass movements of animals have huge ecological impacts. They are also visually arresting, from the spectacle of giant herds of wildebeest trekking across the Serengeti to hundreds of thousands of sandhill cranes flocking along the banks of Nebraska’s Platte River.

In the case of long-lived mammals and birds, the younger animals may learn some of the behaviors associated with migration. That’s not the case with the monarchs, notes Amanda Pierce, a graduate student in Emory’s Population Biology, Ecology and Evolution program, and a co-author of the study.

“We know there is no learning component for the butterflies, because each migration is separated by two to three generations,” Pierce says. “To me, that makes the problem even more interesting. How can these small, delicate animals travel thousands of kilometers and arrive at the same destination as their great-great grandparents?”

A tree in Mexico wears a fluttering cloak of monarchs. Photo by Jaap de Roode.

The question of whether eastern and western monarchs are genetically the same has been hotly debated, and may be an essential piece to the puzzle of their divergent migration patterns.

The researchers used 11 genetic markers to compare the genetic structures of eastern and western monarchs, as well as non-migratory monarch populations in Hawaii and New Zealand. The results showed extensive gene flow between the eastern and western monarchs, and a genetic divergence between these North American butterflies and those from Hawaii and New Zealand.

“In a sense, the genetic markers provide a DNA ‘fingerprint’ for the butterflies,” de Roode says. “Just by looking at this fingerprint, you can easily separate the butterflies of North America from those in Hawaii and New Zealand, but you can’t tell the difference between the eastern and western monarchs.”

The Emory researchers have now joined a project headed by Harvard, which also involves the University of Georgia and the University of Massachusetts, to sequence the full genomes of monarch butterflies from places around the world. That data should rule out genetic differences between the eastern and western monarchs, or reveal whether any smaller genetic differences, beyond the 11 markers used in the study, may be at play between the two groups.

Pismo Beach is a California overwintering site for monarchs. Photo by Jaap de Roode.

The idea that eastern and western monarchs are distinct populations has been bolstered by tagging-and-tracking efforts based in the United States. That data, gathered through citizen science, indicates that the butterflies stay on separate sides of the Rocky Mountains – a formidable high-altitude barrier.

De Roode, however, theorizes that when spring signals the eastern monarchs to leave the overwintering grounds in Mexico, they may simply keep radiating out, reproducing and expanding as long as they find milkweed plants, the food for their caterpillars.

“Few people have tagged the monarchs within Mexico to see where they go,” he says, “because Mexico doesn’t have as much citizen science as the U.S.”

If the theory is correct, some of the monarchs leaving Mexico each spring may wind up in western North America, while others may filter into the eastern United States. This influx to the western U.S. could be crucial to survival of monarchs on that side of the continental divide.

“There are far fewer monarchs west of the Rockies,” de Roode says. He notes that all of the overwintering monarchs on a typical overwintering site along the California coast consist of about the same number clustered onto a single big tree in Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, where hundreds of millions of monarchs blanket the landscape in the winter.

The monarch butterfly migration has been called an endangered phenomenon, due to the loss of habitat along the routes. The Mexican overwintering sites, located in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt region northwest of Mexico City, particularly suffer from deforestation. Drug trafficking in the region has decimated eco-tourism and hampered efforts to protect the trees.

“We hope our research can aid in the conservation of the monarch flyways,” de Roode says.

Raising monarchs for release at weddings, memorials and other events is a growing industry, but U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations restrict shipping the butterflies across state lines.

De Roode stresses that this regulation should remain in force, even if further research confirms that eastern and western monarchs are genetically identical, because parasites that the butterflies carry can differ by region. “It’s not a good idea to be shipping parasites around,” he says.

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Cooking with acorns, painting with moss

Heather Buzzard says she likes to "hack away at the barriers between the indoors and outdoors."

By Mary Loftus, Emory Magazine

At Indie Fixx's TreeHouseHold, Emory graduate Heather Buzzard has written how-to pieces on making seed paper, cooking with acorns, and making moss spray paint—all of which might come in handy during her upcoming stint as artist in residence at the Hostel in the Forest, a spiritual sustainability and environmental education retreat center in Brunswick, Georgia.

Buzzard studied sociology, creative writing, religion, and environmental science at Emory. She cites a course called CORE, on religion and ecology, as particularly influential. “I’ve always been drawn intimately to the natural world,” Buzzard says, “but prior to the class, I hadn’t focused much on sharing that with others, being mindful of sacred space, and incorporating a sense of place and roots into how I live daily.”

At the Hostel in the Forest, she will be applying her understanding of sawdust composting toilets, solar panel water heaters, vegetable oil–powered lighting, organic gardening, and living off the grid.

“I like to take specific elements of the outdoors and integrate them into our everyday lives through sustainable art, design, and food, while focusing on the beauty and magic of the natural world,” she says.

And if you’re wondering if you really can cook with acorns, try her recipe.

Acorn Molasses Cakes

1/2 cup acorn flour

1/2 cup cashews, chopped


1/2 cup pecans or walnuts, chopped

1/2 cup raisins or dates

1 cup cooked brown rice

molasses (or honey) to taste

agave to taste

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ginger
a
pinch brown sugar or sucanat

Mix all ingredients together in large mixing bowl. Add enough molasses/honey so that concoction clumps together nicely without falling apart. Prepare a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a thin spread of butter, and ball the mixture together into smallish round cakes. Sprinkle the tops with brown sugar or sucanat. Bake at 325 for 10–15 minutes.

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Image credits: Top, courtesy of Heather Buzzard; bottom, iStockphoto.com. 

Injury made normal river bacteria hazardous

How could something in Georgia's Little Tallapoosa River have made Aimee Copeland so sick? Atlanta's 11 Alive News took a water sample of the river to Emory's Center for Global Safe Water to test for Aeromonas Hydrophilia, the bacteria that gave the 24-year-old from Snellville necrotizing fasciitis, a vicious, flesh-eating infection. (See video, above.)

The Emory analysis showed that a tablespoon of the river water contains about 140 cells of aeromonas, which is not an unusual amount to find in any untreated lake or river water. Necrotizing fasciitis is a rare disease, and aeromonas bacteria normally do not pose a risk, unless you have a deep cut or traumatic wound.

"The water and the bacteria get forced into the really deep tissue and then it's difficult to get them back out when you clean," says Amy Kirby, a research assistant professor in Emory's Rollins School of Public Health.

Copeland remains in critical condition and faces multiple amputations, following an initial amputation of her left leg after a zip line broke and she fell into the river. Read more at 11alive.com.

How a natural leader bloomed

"Ultimately, the goal is to help prepare students to be leaders in a different world," says anthropology professor Peggy Barlett.

By Carol Clark

Peggy Barlett has this advice for graduates: "Don't listen to the people who say ‘conform to the rules and stay practical.' Listen to your inner wisdom about where this country needs to be and what you can do to help it get there."

Barlett, the Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology and faculty liaison for the Office of Sustainability Initiatives, embodies that advice. She is the recipient of this year's Thomas Jefferson Award, the University's premier honor for significant service to the institution through personal activities, influence and leadership.

Barlett joined the Emory faculty in 1976. The campus, the city and the world had a much different mindset. Many people appreciated natural beauty and worked to maintain it. But broad-based approaches to sustainability were largely confined to specialists like Barlett, who studied the intersection of economic, ecological and demographic change among farmers.

Entering the 21st century, amid growing awareness of the greenhouse effect, attitudes began shifting. A pivotal moment at Emory occurred in 1999, when the decision to build a shuttle route in Lullwater forest sparked controversy. "I began to see more energy on campus around environmental concerns," Barlett recalls. "I decided to take a year off from research and spend that time seeing if we could galvanize some of that momentum."

It was a risky move, since sustainability work on campus didn't fit into the conventional role of faculty. "I thought I was going to run into a brick wall," Barlett recalls. "One person urged me, ‘Just keep calling the meetings, Peggy. Things will change.' To my surprise, people started showing up and expressing interest, at all levels. A lot of people who love Emory wanted to help create a better future."

Barlett began serving as the sustainability point person for faculty, staff, administrators, students and alumni, planting the seeds for Emory to become a nationally recognized green campus. The Piedmont Project, for example, infuses sustainability into the curriculum across disciplines, and has become a model for the country, inspiring hundreds of others.

Meanwhile, she published prolifically. "Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change," co-edited by Barlett, offers firsthand accounts, both inspiring and practical.

Barlett also helped develop the Sustainability Vision for Emory, adopted by the President's Cabinet in 2005 as a core principle of the University's strategic plan. The vision called for an Office of Sustainability Initiatives, and laid out clear and ambitious goals to achieve by 2015. Among them: Reduce average campus energy use by 25 percent, reduce the total waste stream by 65 percent, and procure 75 percent of the food for campus dining facilities from local or sustainably grown sources.

"Ultimately, the goal is to help prepare students to be leaders in a different world," says Barlett, who doesn't take a pessimistic view of the sustainability challenges they face. "This is an exciting time to be part of change, so much is happening. Businesses, governments and nonprofits are moving dynamically. Whole new professions are emerging around sustainability."

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Primatologist says humans may be nice by nature

Hugs, and our capacity for empathy, go way back in our evolutionary history, says primatologist Frans de Waal.

In the decades following the devastation of World War II, the idea that humans are naturally “killer apes,” with a stronger tendency toward aggression than pacifism, gained credence and became a dominant theme in behavioral research.

“Although it is far from my intention to depict us as angels of peace, this literature is now recognized as one-sided,” writes Emory primatologist Frans de Waal in the journal Science. His article, “The Antiquity of Empathy,” is part of a special issue on human conflict.

Humans are biologically geared to find pleasure in eating, sex, nursing and socializing. “If warfare were truly in our DNA, we should happily engage in it,” de Waal writes. “Yet soldiers report a deep revulsion to killing, and only shoot at the enemy under pressure. Many end up with haunting memories and disturbed social lives. Far from being a recent phenomenon, combat trauma was already known to the ancient Greeks, such as Sophocles, who described Ajax’s “divine madness,” now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

Read the whole article here.

Image: istockphoto.com

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A glimpse of world's most elusive gorillas

Using camera traps, the Wildlife Conservation Society recently captured the above video of rare Cross River gorillas, in their habitat of Cameroon’s Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary. They are the world’s rarest and least observed gorilla species: Fewer than 250 of them are left.

While poaching and habitat loss are taking the biggest toll on the gorillas, they are also threatened by viruses and bacteria carried by people. They share 95 to 99 percent of our DNA, raising the potential for pathogen exchange, says Tom Gillespie, associate professor of global health and biodiversity conversation at Emory University.

Gillespie, a leading primate disease ecologist, researches ways to understand, and minimize, the exchange of pathogens between humans and apes. HIV, for example, originated from apes.

Gillespie’s lab, together with partners at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, is analyzing fecal samples from the Cross River gorillas, to monitor for evidence of disease or parasites. Ebola, polio, gastrointestinal parasites and respiratory diseases are examples of human diseases that have also impacted gorillas.

Midway through the video a male silverback thumps his chest and charges toward the camera. “It’s a very humbling experience” to get charged by a gorilla, says Gillespie, who often encounters them face-to-face in the wild. Although gorillas are generally peaceful animals, and do not resort to violence unless provoked, Gillespie says they put on an impressive display. Click here to read more.

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The physics of a philodendrist

 A love of nature led Jed Brody to technology, to try to save nature. Photo by Carol Clark.

How many people do you know who care about the environment so much they don’t drive a car? Meet Jed Brody, an Emory physics senior lecturer who loves trees and let his driver’s license expire when he was 21. Brody, who lives about two miles from campus, gets around Atlanta on foot, bicycle, public transit and through occasional rides from friends. To further reduce his footprint, he keeps his condo at 58 degrees in the winter and does not use air-conditioning.

Brody joined Emory in 2003 and focuses on teaching in the small, but elite, physics department. Two out of the current class of 15 seniors are going on to graduate school at Harvard.

In his spare time, Brody volunteers with Trees Atlanta, reads, and writes fiction. His short story “The Kid Who Ate Paste” placed second in a Creative Loafing writing contest. His science-fiction novel, “The Philodentrist Heresy,” was just published by Moon Willow Press. “Philodentrist” means “tree lover.”

eScienceCommons interviewed Brody in his office.

eScienceCommons: You grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, but I’m guessing it wasn’t a typical suburban childhood.

Jed Brody: My dad had hair down to his shoulders and did Kripalu yoga. Every weekend we went to an ashram where the adults dressed all in white, called each other brother and sister, and crawled on their knees a lot. That seemed normal to me.

eSC: How long have you been writing?

JB: A long time. When I was 10, I wrote a poem called My Perfect World:

Way up on the mountaintop

with all the world below
no factory, no toy, no shop,

just natural things that grow.

eSC: What got you into physics?

JB: In fourth grade, we went on a field trip to a big General Electric plant. During the tour, they showed us these solar panels and talked about the efforts of science to improve energy efficiency. Love of nature led me to technology, to try to save nature.

I went to graduate school in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, because it had been a world leader in making multi-crystalline silicon solar cells. All my solar cells came out crummy. I don't know why, I just wasn't good at making them. It turns out that ideological drive does not confer technical aptitude. I realized that I'm more of a theorist by nature.

eSC: You served in the Peace Corps in Benin in West Africa. What was that like?

A street scene in Benin.

JB: I taught high school physics and chemistry. I learned a lot, teaching 50 to 60 students in classes that were two to three hours

long. It also helped me overcome my adolescent immortality syndrome. I had diarrhea pretty much every day. It was rare when I didn’t have intestinal pain. The Beninese seemed like happy, healthy people and appeared to be mostly immune to the bugs that I had. Many of them are incredibly buff. They use these giant cement tiles to pave their roads and the laborers would hurl them to each other across 30 feet. Their muscles would be working like pistons.

eSC: You’ve published six papers on teaching in science journals. What are they about?

JB: In the most recent one, for the American Journal of Physics, I developed an experiment and an equation for how water oscillates in a tube. The frequency of oscillation is lowest when the tube is about half-full of water. So you have these beautiful, U-shaped curves. It’s a way to teach a variety of physics concepts, including the basic Newtonian mechanics of oscillating motion.

In a previous paper, I described a novel way to determine atmospheric pressure with a similar apparatus. Unlike a conventional barometer, there’s air, not vacuum, above the fluid in the tube. In a way, I invented a kind of barometer for pedagogy. The idea for it grew out of experiences I had teaching in Benin, when I had to demonstrate complex concepts using local materials.

eSC: You also go to India every summer to teach physics to monks as part of the Emory Tibet Science Initiative. How is that going?

JB: It’s challenging, because the monks don’t have a lot of math, but they are great students. They ask some really outlandish questions. I was talking about the gravitational force between the Earth and the moon and a monk said, “What would happen if the moon was shaped like a cone and not a sphere?” That gave me the chance to talk about how gravitational force depends on the distance between the centers of two masses.

The Dalai Lama says that if the ancient Buddhist scholars were alive today they would study science, because Buddhist philosophy is studying what is reality, as opposed to illusion.

eSC: How do you personally reconcile science and religion?

JB: I’m Daoist. I meditate and do tai chi daily, and I consider myself deeply religious. I believe that spirit permeates everything. So to me, studying the laws of physics is a way of communing with spirit.

eSC: What is your novel, “The Philodendrist Heresy,” about?

JB: It’s about a dystopian underground society, where people have been living so long that they have no knowledge of the surface and things like trees, the moon and the sun. The food is recycled glop that comes out of machines, and everyone experiences gastric pain while eating. The heroine, Danielle Gasket, is trying to reach the surface. She’s racing from one clue to the next while being chased by warring factions that want to kill her. It’s kind of a science fiction version of “The Da Vinci Code.”

I’m donating my royalties from the book to Sustainable Harvest International. It’s a charity involved with restoring forests founded by a fellow Peace Corps member.

eSC: Will you ever break down and get a car?

JB: Last night, I actually had a dream that I found my perfect home, in the middle of a forest. So, who knows, I might have to get a car if I lived there. Meanwhile, I don’t feel the need for one. I don’t really believe in sacrifice. I love the way I live. It’s a celebration of the Earth and all of my values.

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Chemists boldly go in search of 'little green molecules'

Extrasolar planet Upsilon Andromedae d, which lies in the habital zone of the Sun-like star Upsilon Andromedae A. The star, about 40 light years from Earth, is known to host three planets. Artist's hypothetical rendering by Lucianomendez, via Wikipedia Commons.

By Carol Clark

Jay Goodwin recalls the late-night 1969 moon landing vividly. His mother woke him up so he could watch Neil Armstrong step onto the lunar surface.

“It was a big deal. I still remember every detail on TV, and going outside to look up at the moon,” Goodwin says. He is now a chemist at Emory, working in the lab of David Lynn, a lead researcher for the NASA-NSF Center for Chemical Evolution.

Like a lot of kids who grew up in the heyday of the space race, Goodwin once dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Little did he know that as a chemist, he would be helping in the search for life beyond Earth.



At the request of NASA and the NSF, Goodwin and Lynn pulled together an international group of scientists in Washington this month to give their input during a workshop called “Alternative Chemistries of Life: Empirical Approaches.” They are now drafting suggestions to the government agencies for how to hone in on the search for other “Earths,” in light of the extraordinary number of exoplanets that powerful telescopes have unveiled.

“The discovery of exoplanets boosts the fascination of what may be out there,” says Goodwin, who prefers not to use the word “extraterrestrial.”

“We’re not looking for ‘little green men,’” Lynn explains. “We’re looking for ‘little green molecules.’”

In addition to synthesizing the input from the 40 scientists who participated in the workshop to draft the advisory report, Goodwin and Lynn will be among those presenting research at the NASA Astrobiology Conference 2012. Hundreds of scientists are gathering April 16-20 at Georgia Tech under the banner “Exploring Life: Past and Present, Near and Far.”

Galileo shows aristocrats of Venice how to use a telescope in a fresco by Giuseppe Bertini.

For centuries, advances in our understanding of the universe were measured at a glacial pace. From the realization that the Earth is not flat, to the daring proposition that the Sun was the center of our solar system, on up to the Big Bang model, the mysteries slowly unraveled.

Now things have speeded up considerably.

The heady era of manned space exploration may have temporarily plateaued, but powerful space-based telescopes like the one on NASA’s Kepler Mission are rapidly boosting our knowledge. Nearly 800 exoplanets have been discovered, including a handful in the habitable zones around stars, where liquid water is possible. It’s estimated that each of the 100 billion stars in our Milky Way harbor one or more planets, which heightens the possibility that our galaxy could be teeming with life in some form or another.

From Earth, we can observe transits of Mercury and Venus when they pass in front of the Sun. Kepler will observe the same phenomena in order to detect Earth-sized planets that are far beyond our solar system. Credit: Dana Berry, NASA Kepler Mission.

“We are not alone,” Lynn says. “It would be statistically impossible to not have other Earths out there, or rocky planets in habitable zones.”

But subtle factors, such as the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the presence of a moon, may be critical for the organization of life as we know it. So what is life exactly, and how would you know it if you saw it on an alien planet?

The more we learn, the more complex that question becomes.

Lynn’s work for the Center for Chemical Evolution is focused on understanding supramolecular self-assembly, and how life may have originated on prebiotic Earth. Meanwhile, the Human Genome Project is fueling research into the evolution of DNA and ways that man might generate “synthetic life” in a laboratory. And exploration of unique environments is uncovering examples of extremophiles, organisms that thrive in conditions that would be detrimental to most life on Earth.

Thermophiles, a type of extremophile that can exist in scathing heat, produce some of the bright colors of Grand Prismatic Spring, above, in Yellowstone National Park. Credit: Jim Peaco, National Park Service.

For the Washington workshop, Lynn and Goodwin invited a range of leading specialists working at the boundary of non-living and living systems. They included microbiologists, marine biologists, geochemists, synthetic chemists, atmospheric chemists, virologists and others.

“We had some interesting conversations,” Goodwin says. “One evening at dinner, a marine biologist told me how he had dropped a bucket into the water off a dock in Maine and cultured organisms from it that he had never seen before. He pointed out that we barely begun to understand what’s beneath our feet here, so how do we know what to look for out there?”

The word cloud above was created from the workshop notes. Click to enlarge.

During the next few months, Lynn and Goodwin will be continuing those conversations as they work on developing guidelines to set the tone for a whole new era in the exploration for life.

“The main goal of brainstorming at the workshop was to stretch our imaginations,” Goodwin says. “This project gives us all a chance to re-engage in the wonderment we felt as children looking up at the moon.”

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Great teacher thrives in unique habitat

The journal Science is publishing biologist Nitya Jacob's paper "Investigating Arabia Mountain: A Molecular Approach" so that other teachers can emulate her methods. Photo by Kay Hinton.

By Carol Clark

A favorite biology professor introduced Nitya Jacob to Arabia Mountain when she was a student at Agnes Scott College. Sandra Bowden took her botany class on field trips to the Georgia granite outcrop.

“I remember thinking how weird and otherworldly the outcrop looked, with strange plants, unique to that habitat,” Jacob says. “I loved getting to see these plants in the wild that I had been learning about.”

Now Jacob is an assistant professor of biology at Emory’s Oxford College, introducing a new generation of students to Arabia Mountain. She developed a lab module that trains freshmen and sophomores to collect samples on the outcrop, then investigate microbial diversity through DNA isolation and sequencing.

“I want my students to be aware of their biological surroundings,” Jacob says. “It’s so easy to go about life without ever thinking about what’s around you.”

The popular lab module, which Jacob has been teaching and refining for six years, is one of only 15 winners nationwide of the 2011 Science Prize for Inquiry-Based Instruction. The journal Science is publishing Jacob’s paper, “Investigating Arabia Mountain: A Molecular Approach,” in its next issue, so that other science teachers can emulate her methods.

“I always had this dream of publishing in Science, like a lot of scientists do,” Jacob says. “But when I decided to focus on teaching, I thought, ‘There goes any chance of seeing my name in Science.’ I’m just blown away by this.”

Jacob's favorite tree growing up was the gulmohar, Hindi for "peacock flower." In English, the tree is known as Royal Poinsetta. Photo by Nitya Jacob.

Jacob grew up in India, in a small town near Pune. Her mother was a professor of English and linguistics, and her father was a professor of psychology and philosophy of religion. But Jacob was fascinated by nature from an early age.

“We had a big yard and I was always surrounded by plants and animals,” she says. “My favorite tree was a gulmohar. It was easy to climb, and it has these fascinating red flowers. Four of the petals are plain red, and one has a white and yellow pattern. It also produced these long seed pods that I could use as a ‘sword.’”

Jacob came to Georgia to attend Agnes Scott College, where she majored in biology. While Sandra Bowden mentored Jacob in biology, chemistry professor Linda Hodges involved her in lab research. “We were isolating compounds from plant extracts to test their anti-glaucoma activity,” Jacob says. “I felt really inspired by getting to do real science.”

The classroom turned out to be Jacob’s true passion, something she realized as a post-doc in Illinois. “I find myself happiest when I’m around students,” she says. “They have a certain kind of energy and an eagerness to learn.”

Oxford students gather microbial samples from Arabia Mountain. While the plants and geology of the granite outcrop have been studied in detail, its microbes have not. Photo by Nitya Jacob.

She found the perfect fit as a teacher at Oxford College, which has easy access to forests, the Oxhouse Science Center and the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area. The mountain is a monadnock, an exposed granite rock, rising nearly 200 feet above the piedmont. Sandy hollows in the granite surface fill with rain water and turn into vernal pools, harboring an array of unusual plants, like the bright-red diamorpha and the endangered fleshy-leafed little amphianthus, and isoetes melanospora – better known as black-spored Merlin’s grass.

These quirky survivors have adapted to extreme heat and drought conditions. “They are truly living on the edge, in this very specific habitat,” Jacob says.

That got her wondering: What unseen life could the outcrop be harboring? While the plants and geology of Arabia Mountain have been studied in detail, its microbes have not.

Jacob’s curiosity, and her desire to inspire students the way her own professors did, led her to work Arabia Mountain into curriculum of Biology 142. She drew on the experience of her colleague, Oxford biologist Eloise Carter, who co-wrote a field guide to granite outcrops.

Working in teams, the students design an original research question about investigating microbial diversity on a granite outcrop. They gather microbial samples in the field, from pools, leaf surfaces, rocks and soil, then grow cultures back in the lab.

First they look for visual differences in the bacterial colonies, which can have different colors, shapes and surface features. The students have isolated two types of bacteria that are purple, for instance, which they have so far collected only from wet or damp environments.

Jacob helps students analyze their data in the lab. Photo by Kay Hinton.

The research teams select morphologically distinct bacteria from their collections and use a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique to amplify the DNA sequence. They further analyze, examine and synthesize the data, looking for patterns in different bacteria from different collection areas. They discuss their outcomes and make arguments, before presenting their findings in a research seminar format.

“I loved that class,” says Susanna Brantley, who took it as a freshman and is now a junior majoring in biology at Emory. “It was a real research project and not a so-called ‘cookbook’ science class. I was learning something, but also doing something meaningful, maybe even contributing to new scientific knowledge.”

The students have made several interesting discoveries. “Some of the bacteria we’ve found has apparently never been identified,” Jacob says. “When you put the DNA into the database and look for a match, there isn’t one.”

Studying bacterial diversity, and how it adapts to different environments, could help solve human problems of pollution, energy and health.

"I want my students to be aware of their biological surroundings," Jacob says. Photo by Carol Clark.

Rachel Koval, who took Jacob’s class in 2006, is working on a masters in public health at the University of Michigan. One of her projects involves looking at microbiological diversity in diarrheal diseases in Peru, to learn more about how the disease has changed as the environment has changed.

“When you learn how microbes adapt to different settings, it can give you a better idea of how natural selection can work,” says Koval, who remains in close touch with Jacob.

Jacob is slight, soft-spoken and preternaturally calm, yet exudes a quiet power. She did not hesitate to use it by politely admonishing a visitor to Arabia Mountain who was trampling an endangered plant while taking a photo.

“My students were really outraged about that and they came to me and asked me to do something,” she recalls. “That’s when I realized that what they are learning is sinking in, and it’s important to them.”

On a recent outing to Arabia, on a sunny day with a cool breeze, students scattered over the face of the outcrop. They called out to Jacob if they saw a plant that was new to them, or found something interesting swimming in a vernal pool.

“I’ve been doing this for years,” Jacob says, “but every time I bring students here they have big smiles on their faces, and that makes it all seem new to me again.”

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A field botanist's take on the pollen blitz

By Carol Clark

The first day of spring was more like summer at Emory’s Oxford College campus, 40 minutes east of Atlanta. It was the seventh straight day of highs above 80 degrees, breaking the March record for an unbroken stretch of such high heat in the Atlanta region.

Biology professor Eloise Carter and students in her field botany course returned to the lab from a trip to nearby Oxhouse Lake, sweaty and dusted in pollen. As the students laid out specimens of flowering plants they collected, Carter brought out her iPhone to show photos to another biologist in the department.

“It’s pollen,” she says, showing what looked like a sandy beach, but was actually tree pollen coating the surface of the water along the lake shore.

The count of 9,369 particles of pollen per cubic meter of air on Tuesday was 55 percent higher than the previous record, set in 1999. A mild winter, leading up to a hot spring, has blown back the clock, driving the blitz of allergens from trees that are pollinated by wind.

Instead of tree pollination extending as usual from February to May, “it’s been telescoped down,” Carter says. “It’s pretty extreme.”

Carter, who has been leading students on biology outings since 1988, has been collecting data for 25 years on what plants flower when around Oxford, Georgia.

The loblolly and short leaf pines are shedding pollen now, on their usual schedule. But flowering that is usually spread out over a month for 10 different varieties of oak has been collapsed to the past few days, she notes. Mulberries, box elders, sweet gums, birch and sycamore are also currently in the mix.

“I’m wondering what’s going to happen downstream from now,” Carter says. Late in the semester, will there be any flowering plants left for her field botany students to collect? Perhaps plants that normally flower in the summer will blossom and fill the spring void, she speculates.

Plants decide when to flower based on the length of day and the temperature. “While plants may respond to temperature changes, insects may or may not,” Carter says. “If you get a real disconnect between plants and their pollinators that may affect the reproduction of rare plants, agriculture plants and others. Plants living on the fringe of their range might even be eliminated.”

Top photo by iStockphoto.com.

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Bluebirds egg on spring

A glorious, blue egg appeared on this first day of spring in a bluebird nest on the quadrangle of Emory's Oxford Campus. The proud parents are busily flitting about amid the oaks and ornamental pear trees. "They just finished building their nest," says Oxford biologist Eloise Carter, who installed a wooden bluebird box just outside of her office. Last year, two clutches of birds were raised in the little box.

If you want to attract bluebirds to your yard, Carter recommends buying a special bluebird house for them, with the right sized opening. "It's best to put the house up in February, because then the bluebirds have time to shop around for a home, but you probably still have time to attract some this season," she says.

Add water and a feeding station. "They especially love mealworms," Carter says. "The birds will see, 'What a great neighborhood, it's got food and it's safe,' and they'll move in."

Fruit flies use alcohol as a drug to kill parasites

By Carol Clark

Fruit flies infected with a blood-borne parasite consume alcohol to self-medicate, a behavior that greatly increases their survival rate, an Emory University study finds.

“We believe our results are the first to show that alcohol consumption can have a protective effect against infectious disease, and in particular against blood-borne parasites,” says Todd Schlenke, the evolutionary geneticist who led the research.

“It may be that fruit flies are uniquely adapted to using alcohol as medicine,” he adds, “but our data raise an important question: Could other organisms, perhaps even humans, control blood-borne parasites through high doses of alcohol?”

Current Biology is publishing the study, co-authored by Emory graduate student Neil Milan and undergraduate student Balint Kacsoh.

The results add to the growing body of evidence that some animals know how to use toxic substances found in nature as medicine.

A vicious, co-evolutionary battle is constantly ongoing between the common fruit fly, above, and tiny, parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs in the larvae of fruit flies. Photo by Andre Karwath/Wikipedia Commons.

Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly that swirls around browning bananas in your kitchen, is an important biological model system. The Schlenke lab uses D. melanogaster to study how immune systems adapt to pathogens.

The fly larvae eat the rot, or fungi and bacteria, that grows on overripe, fermenting fruit. “They’re essentially living in booze,” Schlenke says. “The amount of alcohol in their natural habitat can range from 5 to 15 percent. Imagine if everything that you ate and drank all day long was 5-percent alcohol. We wouldn’t be able to live like that, but fruit flies are really good at detoxifying alcohol.”

Tiny, endoparasitoid wasps are major killers of fruit flies. The wasps inject their eggs inside the fruit fly larvae, along with venom that aims to suppress their hosts’ immune response. If the venom is effective enough, the wasp egg hatches, and the wasp larva begins to eat the fruit fly larva from the inside out. Eventually, an adult wasp emerges from the remains of the fruit fly pupa.

Adult wasps are about to emerge from fruit fly pupae, above, after eating the fruit fly larvae from the inside out. Photo by Todd Schlenke.

Some fruit flies, however, can overcome the effects of wasp venom and mount an immune response against wasp eggs. The blood cells in these fly larvae swarm over the wasp eggs and release nasty chemicals to kill them, allowing the fruit fly larvae to grow into adults.

“A constant co-evolutionary battle is going on between the immune systems of the flies and the venoms of the wasps,” Schlenke says. “Any new mechanism of defense that protects flies from wasps will tend to spread through fly populations by natural selection.”

Schlenke wondered if the fruit flies could be tapping the toxic effects of alcohol in their natural habitat to fight off wasps.

To test the theory, the researchers used a bisected petri dish filled with the yeast that fruit flies are normally fed in a lab environment. The yeast on one side of the dish was mixed with 6 percent alcohol, while the yeast on the other side remained alcohol-free. The researchers then released fruit fly larvae into the dish, allowing them to freely move to either side.

After 24 hours, 80 percent of the fruit fly larvae that were infected with wasps were on the alcohol side of the dish, while only 30 percent of the non-infected fruit fly larvae were on the alcohol side.


If fruit flies infected with wasps tap the alcohol in rotting fruit, it raises their blood-alcohol levels and their survival rates. The alcohol doesn't just kill the wasps, it essentially liquifies them. Photo by Carol Clark.

“The strength of the result was surprising,” Schlenke says. “The infected fruit flies really do seem to purposely consume alcohol, and the alcohol consumption correlates to much higher survival rates.”

Infected fruit flies that consumed alcohol beat out the wasps in about 60 percent of the cases, compared to a 0 percent survival rate for fruit fly controls that fed on plain yeast.

“The wasps aren’t as good as the flies at handling alcohol,” Schlenke says.

A developing wasp knocked out within an alcohol-consuming fly larva dies in a particularly horrible way, he adds. “The wasp’s internal organs disperse and appear to be ejected out of its anus. It’s an unusual phenotype that we haven’t seen in our wasps before,” Schlenke says.

The lab repeated the experiment using another species of wasp that specializes in laying its eggs in D. melanogaster, rather than the generalist wasp used previously. Again, 80 percent of the infected flies wound up on the alcohol side of the dish, while only 30 percent of the uninfected flies did. But the alcohol diet was far less effective against the specialist wasps, killing them in only 10 percent of the cases.

“You would expect this kind of result,” Schlenke says, “since the generalist wasp species can attack plenty of other flies, but the specialist wasps are under strong pressure to adapt to the alcohol-infused habitat of D. melanogaster.”

The researchers hope that their data will lead to more studies of how alcohol may control pathogens in other organisms, including humans.

“Although many studies in humans have shown decreased immune function in chronic consumers of alcohol, little attempt has been made to assay any beneficial effect of acute or moderate alcohol use on parasite mortality or overall host fitness following infection,” Schlenke says.

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On the trail of black flies and river blindness

The parasite that causes river blindness, Onchocerca volvulus, is transmitted through the bite of the black fly. In the above photo, the parasite can be seen emerging from the antenna of a black fly. (Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

Onchocerciasis, better known as “river blindness,” is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness in the world. More than 18 million people suffer from river blindness, the vast majority of them in Africa.

The disease is caused by parasitic worms that are spread to humans through the bite of the black fly. The symptoms include itching so severe that those infected have been known to claw their skin off – or even commit suicide. The disease can also harden the eye tissue, leading to permanent blindness.

A documentary called “Dark Forest Black Fly” is tracking the efforts of the Carter Center and its partners to wipe out river blindness in Uganda. If successful, Uganda may become the model for eliminating river blindness Africa-wide. (Watch the film's trailer, below.)

The filmmakers and scientists involved will describe their on-the-ground experiences of this historic public health effort on Tuesday, February 7, at the Carter Center in Atlanta. The program will include exclusive footage from “Dark Forest Black Fly,” to be completed this year. Click here for details of the event.

And click here to visit the Science Scene, where you can learn about more great science events at Emory and in metro Atlanta.

Brace yourself for tornado season

Downed trees at the Emory law school, following a 2011 windstorm.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has designated February 6-10 Severe Weather Awareness Week for Georgia. Do you have a plan for what to do in case of severe winds or a tornado? If not, it’s time to get one. Click here for guidance from Emory’s Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response.

Severe weather is common in Atlanta, where large trees make heavy winds especially dangerous. Last year, a windstorm took down 40 trees on the Emory campus alone.

Tornadoes have been reported throughout the year, but they are most likely to occur from March to May. Georgia lies within what is referred to as “Dixie Alley,” where tornado activity is on par with the better-known “Tornado Alley.” Tornadoes can spawn with very little warning. In Georgia, tornadoes are more likely to strike at night, tend to stay on the ground longer, and are often hard to see as they are wrapped in areas of rain and hail.

Below is video of a 2008 tornado as it approached downtown Atlanta.



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Chinese war secrets: Beyond 'Guns, Germs and Steel'

Emory historian Tonio Andrade explains why he wrote his latest book, “Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West,” in this column for Rorotoko.com:

"In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, 'Guns, Germs, and Steel,' which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t. His explanation was geographical—it depended on where those societies were located and what ecological resources they had available to them. Eurasians (that is the people of Europe and Asia) were unusually blessed just because of where they lived, and so they developed techniques and technologies that enabled them to expand around the world.

"It’s a great book, but it leaves open an important question: why did Europeans rather than other Eurasians become so powerful on the world stage in modern times—i.e., after around 1500? After all, Asians—most notably the Chinese—had been world leaders in science and technology for centuries. What accounted for the sudden leap in European power vis-à-vis Asia in recent centuries?

"Historians and sociologists have been vehemently debating this question, but with little progress.

"It seemed to me that one way to help answer it was to look at warfare between Europeans and Chinese. So I did. And the war that I describe in this book is a fascinating and exciting one. It really is an 'untold story'—the first ever major conflict between western European and Chinese forces, and the last one until the famous Opium War of the 1800s.

"The Chinese lost the Opium War. They won the Sino-Dutch War. Why? How? Technology, weather, and leadership."

Read the whole article in Rorotoko.com.

Shedding light on a pre-electric sleep culture

A sleeping Buddha in Southeast Asia. "The window of opportunity to understand sleep without electricity is closing, because the traditional cultures of sleep are vanishing," says anthropologist Carol Worthman.

By Carol Clark

About 20 percent of the world population lives without electricity. You may wonder how these people make it through their waking hours, but Carol Worthman wants to know how they sleep.

Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University, is leading the first quantitative study of sleeping habits in a pre-electric environment. The sleep study is just one part of a larger, five-year project to begin soon in rural Vietnam, involving 14 villages that have not been electrified or exposed to television. Half of the villages will eventually be introduced to generator-powered televisions for the experiment, while the other half will not.

The National Institute of Health and the Vietnamese government are supporting the project, headed by Penn State, which aims to answer questions about how watching television affects human health and behavior.

Worthman, a leading expert on the ecology of sleep, is most excited about garnering the baseline data for pre-electric sleep. “The window of opportunity to understand sleep without electricity is closing, because the traditional cultures of sleep are vanishing,” she says. One of the development goals of WHO, she notes, is to see every populated part of the world electrified by 2020.

“We will be filling a gap in scientific knowledge by getting the first empirical data for how people sleep with no electricity, just the sun, when their whole world revolves around subsistence and nature,” Worthman says. “Many people have this idea that in the good old days we got more sleep, but did we? Are we romanticizing our history?”

A Vietnamese woman relaxes with her baby. One development goal of WHO is to see every part of the world electrified by 2020.

The 14 villages involved in the study are in a remote, mountainous location of Vietnam, near the Laotian border. Most of the people in the area belong to the Tai ethnic group and are subsistence farmers. Whole families generally sleep in one or two rooms, due to the small size of the homes.

Participants in the experiment will continuously wear a sleep actigraph, a wristwatch-like device that records movement. An actigraph is sensitive enough to detect whether its wearer is sleeping or just resting, has entered a deep sleep state, known as REM, and how often the wearer stirs or wakes up from a deep sleep.

“The data will suggest the architecture of their sleep,” Worthman says. “We will get a sense of how much sleep they are getting, whether it is interrupted frequently, and whether their sleep is mostly consolidated, or more scattered across 24 hours through naps.”

The experiment is expected to begin this Spring. After the baseline data are collected, seven of the villages will serve as controls for the experiment, while televisions powered by generators will be introduced to the other half. Every 20th household will get a communal TV set, with three channels of programming that run from 4 pm to 10 pm. At several points over the course of five years after the introduction of TV, the sleep patterns of the subjects will again be monitored to see if they have changed.

A satellite dish pokes up between two thatched huts in an isolated area of Vietnam. Anthropologists want to know how TV changes people's sleep patterns, and their outlook on life.

“This experiment is not going to answer all the questions about human sleep, but it could provide us with some fresh ideas and questions,” Worthman says.

Are some of the sleep disorders common to modernized society tied to electricity and TV viewing? One theory holds that people who watch TV lose major chunks of time, forcing them to stay up later to complete other tasks like cleaning or doing homework. Some people watch TV to relax in the evening, but how does all that light beamed into their eyes just before bed affect their ability to get to sleep? Does the content of the programs affect sleep?

Adolescents typically experience a change in their biological clocks, causing them to want to stay up later and get up later. “TV and other forms of media can feed that propensity,” Worthman says, “but then they get slammed the next day because they have to get up for school.”

The overarching study will look at larger effects of TV viewing on health and well-being, beyond sleep. Worthman will also collect both baseline and follow-up data for this segment of the study, with a focus on adolescents.

Her team will look at how the activities, social lives and relationships of teenagers, along with their values, goals and attitudes, change after the introduction of TV.

“One thing we’re interested in is how learning about life outside of their village through TV may affect them,” Worthman says. “Will they will find TV programming inspirational or frustrating? What’s the role of a globalized world in fostering anxiety? If you are plugged into media, are you less, or more, depressed and anxious?”

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Some eye-opening thoughts on sleep

In the U.S., it's perfectly normal to sleep with your dog or cat, but huge cultural battles are being fought over whether it's odd, or even detrimental, to sleep with your baby. In much of the developing world, people think just the opposite, says anthropologist Carol Worthman.

By Carol Clark

Emory anthropologist Carol Worthman first began thinking about the cultures of sleep while traveling across Kenya in 1979 as a postdoctoral fellow. She was headed to the coast in an old, classic train with wooden slats that rolled down over the windows. The cheap ticket section was so packed for the overnight journey that mothers and children shared bunks in the women’s section.

“Children were crying. It was really noisy and I couldn’t get comfortable. I didn’t sleep much at all,” Worthman says.

The locals, however, took it in stride. “In the morning, everyone around me got up looking bright and beaming,” Worthman says. “I thought, ‘They don’t sleep like Westerners do.’”

Nearly two decades later, Worthman was asked by a pediatrician to sum up what anthropologists know about sleep. She thought about it and had to respond, “Not much.” While most waking moments of human activity were well-documented, their sleeping ones were largely ignored by anthropologists.

“When people go to sleep is when we can finally write up our notes,” Worthman jokes.

But the realization that her field had overlooked one-third of human life spurred her to work on the first analytic framework for comparative studies of human sleep behavior in 1998.

She pored over the literature, and interviewed field researchers about their observations of the ecology of sleep from across continents, cultures and climates in the developing world. From foragers to farmers, islanders to mountain dwellers, patterns of sleep behavior began to emerge.

“I was startled,” Worthman says. “You learn just how weird our sleeping habits are in the United States.”

For instance, many Americans consider it odd, and perhaps detrimental, to sleep with a newborn baby. And yet it’s perfectly normal to sleep with a dog or cat.

“In much of the developing world, people think just the opposite,” Worthman says. “It’s pretty much universal that babies don’t sleep alone. They either lie right next to their mothers, or nearby on a mat, or in a cradle or a sling.”

Putting a baby in a separate room to sleep would be viewed as tantamount to child abuse in many cultures, Worthman says.

For much of human history, humans have slept in family groups, with one ear cocked for danger. They were comforted by the sounds of their livestock shuffling, their babies breathing and the crackle of a smoky fire to ward off bugs and larger predators. “Sleeping like a log” is not so desirable if you could roll into the fire, or miss the sound of an approaching predator.

Worthman’s work has shown that rural, and even some urban, communities of the developing world have markedly different sleeping patterns than the typical American. “You can actually quantitatively show that culture drives human sleep behavior,” she says.

Building on her decades of research, Worthman is about to launch the first quantitative study of a pre-electric sleep culture, a major experiment set to begin soon in rural Vietnam. Click here to read more about the study.

It’s only relatively recently that electricity, larger homes, box springs, non-allergenic mattresses and climate-controlled interiors have altered our sleep environments. This rapid shift leads Worthman to wonder if modern sleep practices have set us up for chronic problems such as insomnia, sleep apnea and parental anxiety over a newborn’s sleep patterns.
Photo by Klaus Roesch

For instance, in many cultures, people tend to take more naps and have less rigid expectations for sleeping straight through the night. Some evidence indicates that in pre-gaslight Europe, it was not uncommon for people to have an early evening sleep, then wake up later in the night for a while, before returning to a deeper sleep state.

Modern-day insomniacs may actually be the more normal ones, Worthman notes. “In our culture, we have this very fixed idea that you should lie down and go out like a light,” she says. “One of the problems with insomnia is that people become very anxious about it. If they relaxed, went with the flow, and perhaps took a nap during the day, maybe it would help.”

All images, iStockphoto.com, unless otherwise noted.

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Trees and reality TV drive discovery in 2011

In 2011, flashes of inspiration made fundamental science at Emory seem almost easy. A hike in the woods sparked a breakthrough in number theory, while an episode of “American Idol” led to an insight about the human brain.

Actually, it takes a certain brilliance to find big ideas hiding amid trees and reality TV. To paraphrase Louis Pasteur, whether you are an athlete or a couch potato, chance favors a prepared mind.

Here’s a roundup of the hottest topics on eScienceCommons for 2011.

New theories reveal the nature of numbers: For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. The eureka moment finally occurred when mathematicians were hiking through the fall foliage in north Georgia and noticed patterns in the trees and the switchback trail. Partition numbers are fractal, repeating in an infinite pattern, they suddenly realized.

Teen brains can predict pop song success: A neuroeconomist was watching “American Idol” with his two young daughters when a contestant started singing “Apologize” by One Republic. The song sounded familiar, and the scientist realized that he had used it in a study. That led to a re-analysis of brain-response data of teens listening to obscure songs. The results show that teen brain activity may help predict the popularity of music.

Dawn of agriculture took toll on health: Anthropologists confirmed that when populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of the location or the types of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and the health of the people declined. In modern times, the stature trend has reversed: The average human height is increasing, as food becomes increasingly commercialized and abundant. But is our health improving, in an era of obesity?

Anxious kids confuse ‘mad’ and ‘sad’: Psychologists found that children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones. Non-verbal communication is a critical, but often overlooked, aspect of child development. The good news is that non-verbal communication skills can be improved at any age.

Chimps, bonobos yield clues to social brain: It’s been a puzzle why our two closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have widely different social traits, despite belonging to the same genus. Now, a comparative analysis of their brains shows neuroanatomical differences that may be responsible for these behaviors, from the aggression more typical of chimpanzees to the social tolerance of bonobos.

Chemists reveal the force within you: A new method for visualizing mechanical forces on the surface of a cell provides the first detailed view of those forces, as they occur in real-time. Mapping such forces may help to diagnose and treat diseases related to cellular mechanics. Cancer cells, for instance, move differently from normal cells, and it is unclear whether that difference is a cause or an effect of the disease.

Hominid skull hints at later brain evolution: An analysis of a skull from the most complete early hominid fossils ever found suggests that the large and complex human brain may have evolved more rapidly than previously realized, and at a later time than some other human characteristics. While some features of Australopithecus sediba were more human-like, most notably the precision-grip hand, the brain was more ape-like.

Biochemical cell signals quantified for first time: Just as cell phones and computers transmit data through electronic networks, the cells of your body send and receive chemical messages through molecular pathways. The term “cell signaling” was coined more than 30 years ago to describe this process. Now, for the first time, physicists have quantified the data capacity of a biochemical signaling pathway and found a surprise – it’s way lower than even an old-fashioned, dial-up modem.


Mummies tell history of a modern plague: Mummies from along the Nile are revealing how age-old irrigation techniques may have boosted the plague of schistosomiasis, a water-borne parasitic disease that infects an estimated 200 million people today. An analysis of the mummies provides details about the prevalence of the disease across populations in ancient times, and how human alteration of the environment may have contributed to its spread.

Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past: Paleontologists discovered a group of more than 20 polar dinosaur tracks on the coast of Victoria, Australia, offering a rare glimpse into animal behavior during the last period of pronounced global warming, about 105 million years ago. The discovery is the largest and best collection of polar dinosaur tracks ever found in the Southern Hemisphere.


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