The bi-polar ape, in love and war

“It is interesting in discussing the history of human violence to know that we have one close relative who is sort of a happy, go-lucky hippie primate, and we have one that is pretty brutal,” says Emory primatologist Frans de Waal, referring to the bonobo and the chimpanzee.

In the above video, de Waal debates whether human nature is essentially violent with psychologist Steven Pinker and anthropologist Richard Wrangham, both of Harvard.

So what can the Pentagon learn from the behaviors of chimpanzees and bonobos? De Waal covers that topic in the video below.

“I was invited one time to a think tank of the Pentagon,” he says. “I was the only animal person, the only primatologist. All the others were anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists. The Pentagon asked us the question, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, what’s going to happen to a super power that’s the only super power in the world? How can we use that status in the world?”

The videos were produced by the Department of Expansion and the Leakey Foundation.


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Fiction, facts and values of synthetic biology

“The story of Frankenstein is a scientific one,” says bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, adding that the classic tale by Mary Shelley is “a product of the Christian cultural milieu that had underpinnings of suspicion and worry about technology.”

Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics, was one of the speakers at recent meetings on the future of synthetic biology, held by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

What is synthetic biology? Are molecular biologists playing God? Should we be more excited or frightened by the potential to make life as we don’t know it? Click here to listen and watch as experts explain some of the challenges ahead, including communicating potential benefits and risks of synthetic biology to the public.

Emory President James Wagner is vice chair of the Presidential Commission, which plans more public meetings in November, on the Emory campus.

Illustration, above, from 1831 edition of "Frankenstein." Source: Wikipedia Commons.

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Dogs may help collar Chagas disease

Mongrel dogs have a hardscrabble life in poor, rural communities of Argentina.

Some diseases, like stray dogs, are largely neglected by society.

Chagas disease, for example, is caused by a parasite that roams with only limited control among the rural poor in Latin America. The main vector for the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi is the triatomine insect, or “kissing bug,” which thrives in the nooks and crannies of mud-brick dwellings. The bug sucks the blood of mammals, helping T. cruzi move between wildlife, cats, dogs and humans.

“Dogs tend to lie on porches or other areas easily accessible to the bugs,” says disease ecologist Uriel Kitron, chair of environmental studies at Emory. “And when a dog is malnourished and its immune system isn’t great, they are even more at risk.”

Kitron has been researching Chagas disease in remote communities of northern Argentina for the past 10 years. “One of our most significant findings is the importance of dogs in both the spread of the disease, and the potential to help control it,” he says, explaining that dogs can make good sentinels for health officials monitoring T. cruzi transmission.

Chagas disease begins as an acute infection that can subside on its own. In one out of three cases, however, the infection persists and can go unnoticed for decades, until it causes complications such as heart failure, digestive problems and sudden cardiac death. The condition affects 10 to 12 million people in Latin America, killing more than 15,000 a year.

Human migration has moved Chagas disease around the globe: U.S. blood banks must now screen donors for T. cruzi. And bugs travel hidden in people’s luggage to new places such as Patagonia in southern Argentina.

Kitron is collaborating with Ricardo Gürtler of the University of Buenos Aires on a research project funded through a joint NIH-NSF program on the ecology of infectious diseases. Their work in Argentina’s Chaco province is included in a June 24 special supplement of Nature, devoted to the topic of Chagas disease.

“We are interested in answering scientific questions, but we also want to help reduce the risk and the impact of the disease on the rural population,” Kitron says.

Few government resources make it to the rural poor, and the main control for Chagas disease is spraying insecticide. “It’s a limited strategy,” Kitron says. “If you want to control Chagas disease, you have to look at the whole picture.”
A mud-brick home is emptied of its contents, before spraying with insecticide.

The researchers have shown, for example, that people with fewer than two dogs in a household are unlikely to become infected. It turns out that dogs are 14 times more effective at spreading Chagas disease than humans.

“Many of the dogs are not in good shape, they’re exposed to a whole bunch of parasites and worms and they just get scraps to eat,” Kitron says. “But the idea of just eliminating the dogs is not an option. People really care about their dogs.”

An alternative may be to identify dogs that are most at risk of remaining infectious for a long period of time. These “super spreaders” could be targeted with insecticide collars. Research is also ongoing for a vaccine against T. cruzi in mongrel dogs.

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Brain versus gut: Our inborn food fight

The relatively larger human brain makes us the most intelligent of the primates. But if we’re so smart, how come we’ve eaten our way into an obesity epidemic?

One reason is the relatively smaller human stomach and shorter large intestines, says Emory anthropologist George Armelagos.

“Our evolutionary history has given us a brain that is focused much of the time on eating, and a gut that isn’t designed for today’s variety and volume of high-density food,” explains Armelagos, a bioarcheologist and an expert in prehistoric diets.

Armelagos recently wrote a review of research on evolution and the human diet, published in the Journal of Anthropological Research.

Journalist Michael Pollan popularized the concept of “the omnivore’s dilemma,” the desire for dietary variety paired with the perilous search for new foods, in his best-selling book by the same name. Pollan primarily covered how today’s abundance of food is fueling a national eating disorder.

Armelagos focuses on the prehistoric perspective. “Our current pattern of eating reflects the way in which Homo sapiens evolved and resolved the omnivore’s dilemma,” he says. “Our cravings for certain foods don’t go back just a few years, or even 10,000 years, but more than a million years."

For thousands of millennia, our ancestors subsisted as foragers, hunting and gathering in marginal environments. The expansion of the brain’s neocortex in early humans facilitated social cognition and memory, supporting the task of finding edible plants and prey amid the vagaries of an unpredictable climate.

Larger brains, however, increased caloric demands: The human brain, which represents only 2 percent of our body mass, consumes 20 percent of our energy. Around two million years ago, Armelagos says, our early ancestors began evolving a smaller total gut size, relative to other primates.

“The expensive-tissue hypothesis argues that our big brains are fueled by the energy saved by our having a smaller stomach and shorter large intestines,” he says. “Whatever the reasons for the changes in the alimentary canal, there is no question that they necessitated diets of high-quality, high-density foods.”

Fast-forward through millennia to the development of agriculture, cooking, the industrialization of food, and finally the advent of McDonalds. Today we’re faced with a perfect storm that’s capsizing the nutritional benefits of our adapted biology, Armelagos says.

“If you study our primitive pasts, the biological underpinnings of today’s obesity epidemic become clear,” Armelagos says. “But a solution to this complex bio-cultural problem is not so clear.”

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Is that latte worth $4? You better believe it.

By Carol Clark

For years, I’ve stayed loyal to my cell phone: a basic candy bar model. Cheap. Great reception. Easy. Which explains why I was naïve enough to think I could go to the Apple store yesterday and pick up an iPhone 4. The hundreds of geeks who brought lawn chairs and books for the line snaking through Lenox Mall made it clear I was a novice at technical self-indulgence. So I went downstairs to Starbucks to console myself with a latte.

I checked my email and saw this article from U.S. News and World Report on 10 things to splurge on this summer (including an iPhone 4 and a trip to Starbucks for the new free wi-fii.) Validation of your purchases, and attempted purchases, is what you need when you’re sipping a $4 coffee.

What really drove it all home for me was the message from an Emory scientist quoted in the U.S. News article. Here's the excerpt:

Gregory Berns, a professor in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences as well as economics at Emory University, found that when people pay more for products that they believe enhance their mental acuity (such as coffee or energy drinks), then they are more likely to work. Berns identifies this as a "placebo" effect. Basically, it works because people believe it works. That means if you believe a $4 coffee will help you ace a test or perform well in an interview, then you should spend $4 on that coffee because it probably will help you.

"We have been conditioned to expect that higher prices equates to higher quality," explains Berns. "Therefore with a product like an energy drink, you expect the more expensive it is, the better it works."

But is a $4 coffee really better than a $1 one? It is if you believe it is, says Berns.

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