Graduate student Arielle Cooley and undergraduate Por Tangwancharoen work in the Biology greenhouse on plants that are being grown to study the genetic basis of floral traits, as well as flower size and drought tolerance.
Duke Biology Box 90338 Durham, NC 27708 Phone: 919-660-7372 Fax: 919-660-7293
Thursday, December 5, 2013, 12:00pm,
Evolution And Development Seminar
French Family Science- room 4219
Karin Akre (Johnsen Lab)
"Proportional Psychophysics and the Evolution of Behavior"
Thursday, December 5, 2013, 1:30pm,
University Program In Ecology Seminar
French Science Conference Rm 2237
Gregg Gunnell (Duke Lemur Center)
"The Biodiversity Crisis in Madagascar - A Paleontological Perspective"
Zhen-Ming Pei wants to understand how plants sense basic aspects of their environment: salt, temperature and most of all, water. They do this with ion channels, specialized parts of cell membranes that open and close in response to environmental signals. If water is present the corresponding channel stays closed. When the plant lacks water, the channel opens and allows calcium to enter the cell. There the calcium atoms bind to an array of different proteins, triggering processes which allow plants to save water.
Identifying the genes responsible requires years of painstaking labor, generating plants with random mutations and sorting through them to find the ones that don't have the calcium cascade. That means that the ion channel is not working and its controlling gene has mutated. Zhen-Ming’s lab can propagate these plants for further study.
Obviously drought- and salt-resistant crops would have great importance for agriculture. But Zhen-Ming really wants to work on a big question: sensing processes. The rest of the time he is happy tinkering with his car.
moreChantal Reid is excited about teaching “How Plants Feed and Fuel the World.” She and Jim Siedow have taught it before, but this time is different: they've “flipped” the classroom and instituted “team-based learning.” “You can see the students learning, it’s really exciting,” she says. “I don’t ever want to teach another way.”
Flipping? Teams? Huh?
In a flipped class, there is no formal lecture; the students prepare by studying the assigned material beforehand. Class begins with a test taken individually and then in teams. The students discuss the material and debate the correct answers; the faculty are careful to make the teams roughly equal in ability so that those with more background can help the others. Meanwhile the professors hover, ready to guide the discussion if it starts going down the wrong path. If lots of students have the same misunderstanding, the faculty can halt the discussion and give a mini-lecture on that subject. The teams also do projects together, such as analyzing data taken from a published paper without knowing the author's conclusions. The students end up teaching themselves, which is pretty sweet for the faculty!
Actually, preparing short videos, study guides and tests takes a lot of time. If she had any spare time, Chantal would use her creativity to sew all her own clothes.
The New York Times of Nov. 18, 2013 published an article featuring among others the work of Manuel Leal on reptilian intelligence, including video of a very dashing green anole solving the problem of uncorking a tube to get his dinner. more
Mohamed Noor's Coursera class on Genetics and Evolution drew some 30,000 students--and a little over 2000 even finished all the assignments! Students formed discussion groups in Portuguese, more