Dr Mohamed Noor, Professor in the Biology Department and Dean of Natural Sciences, was interviewed by the North Carolina journal News & Observer, to talk about his outreach work based on the Star Trek Universe. In addition to having a succesful outreach program based on the popular Sci-fi series, Dr. Noor is one of the science consultants of the series Star Trek Discovery.

Read the full story here. 

Duke’s leading scholars are once again prominently featured on the annual list of “Most Highly Cited Researchers.”

Thirty-seven Duke faculty were named to the list this year, based on the number of highly cited papers they produced over an 11-year period from January 2009 to December 2019.  Citation rate, as tracked by Clarivate’s Web of Science, is an approximate measure of a study’s influence and importance.

Forty-eight years. That’s more than twice the average age of your typical Duke undergrad. That is how long Dr. David McClay, the Arthur S. Pearse Distinguished Professor of Biology, has been teaching Cell Biology to cohort after cohort of Duke students.

Today, the Biology department celebrated Dr. McClay’s last lecture with a friendly “zoom-bombing”. Dozens of colleagues and ex-students flooded his last virtual lecture to celebrate his ability to instill a passion for Biology in the classroom.

According to a new Duke University study, the ability to mentally categorize colors is not a universal avian attribute, and dull-colored birds may see the world in a completely different way than their colorful cousins.

Patek lab alum Patrick Green (currently a postdoc at the University of Exeter) and PhD candidate Jacob Harrison just published in Animal Behaviour showing that, when presented with empty burrows, shrimps prefer homes that are a tad too large.

Quantifying how microbes grow is fundamental to areas such as genetics, bioengineering, and food safety. In a collaboration between the Schmid lab and Duke Statistics, Tonner and colleagues revisit the old problem of understanding microbial growth.

PhD Student Matthew Zipple, Susan Peters, Bill Searcy (U. Miami), and Steve Nowicki found that female swamp sparrows do not show any preference for the songs of males that are in the peak of their lives as compared to songs recorded from the same males after they senesced.

DURHAM, N.C. -- We know that the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 crisis lived harmlessly in bats and other wildlife before it jumped the species barrier and spilled over to humans.

Now, researchers at Duke University have identified a number of “silent” mutations in the roughly 30,000 letters of the virus’s genetic code that helped it thrive once it made the leap -- and possibly helped set the stage for the global pandemic. The subtle changes involved how the virus folded its RNA molecules within human cells.

Check this out!  The Gibert Lab has contributed video of a protist eating a smaller protist to Duke Today.  Euplotus sp. creates water currents that sweep the smaller protozoan into its mouth.  Down the hatch!

Three Biograds have won fellowships as Bass Instructors of Record and will teach special topics seminar courses next spring.  Stepping out will be:

“Salicylic acid (SA) is a plant hormone that is critical for resistance to pathogens.”  So begins a pivotal new study by Xinnian Dong’s lab in collaboration with Ning Zheng’s lab at the University of Washington (“Structural basis of salicylic acid perception by Arabidopsis NPR proteins.” Nature 586, 311-316).  Plant pathologists have long known that the NPR proteins are responsible for sensing the presence of SA, but not how they do it.  Now Dong and Zheng et al