Use It or Lose It

No, not that -- we're talking about brains!

Guy Potter in Duke's psychiatry department has pulled yet another gem from the massive, longterm Duke Twins Study: people who do mentally challenging work retained improved memory and thinking skills well into retirement, when compared with folks who weren't necessarily paid to think.

The study cohort is a gold mine because it includes IQ tests these twins took upon entering the military for World War II. Being higher IQ early in life isn't a guarantee you'll be sharp in your 80s; and using your noodle throughout your career can turn a lackluster IQ into a pretty quick septugenarian. See Melissa Schwarting's release.

(Photo by Gaetan Lee)

Sea Cow Roundup

-Posted by Karl Bates

Banana leaves and netting wouldn't be much good in trying to capture a terrestrial cow, but for a rare sea-cow off the coast of the Costa Rican/Panamanian border, it proved to be just the thing.

Duke ecology graduate student Daniel Gonzalez has reported the first capture of a Manatee in southern mesoamerica, a feat that required 20 people and remarkable amounts of patience.

The half-ton Antillean manatees (Trichechus manatus ssp. manatus) proved agile and cunning, contrary to their reputation as plodding and simple-minded.

“These animals were feeding, fully alert, and capable of incredible bursts of strength – a force to be reckoned with,” Gonzalez told a reporter for the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund.

After a week of trying, the team -- half in the water half in boats -- finally netted a 2-meter female, tagged her for satellite tracking, and set her loose among the mangroves again. Researchers hope she provides a first glimpse into this little-studied subpopulation of grazing sea mammals.

Small Bones, Big Controversy

In two rocky caves on the Micronesian nation of Palau, a team of scientists including Duke paleontologist Steven Churchill has discovered fossil bones from some two dozen tiny humans who inhabited the island between roughly 900 and 2,900 years ago.

Writing in the online journal PloS ONE, the team said the bones were from modern humans (Homo sapiens), with the earliest fossils belonging to individuals who were three to four feet tall and weighed 70 to 90 pounds. Though modern, the individuals to whom the bones once belonged had several traits considered primitive, or archaic, for the human lineage.

(In the top photo, a lower jaw dated at 2,900 years old and one from an average-size modern female show the size difference between the early Palauans and people today. In the bottom photo, a team member explores a cave.)

The team says the findings expand the known range of variation in modern humans in Southeast Asia.

But what has led the New York Times and numerous other popular media outlets to run with the story is that the findings add fuel to debate raging -- at least in paleontological circles -- around the 2003 discovery by other scientists of some older and even smaller human fossil bones than those found on Palau. Check this report from the National Geographic Society, which funded the search in Palau.

At issue is whether the smaller specimens, found on the Indonesian island of Flores and immediately dubbed “hobbits,” represent modern humans reduced in stature by disease, genetics or some other biological process -- or, as their discoverers claim, represent a separate species, termed Homo floresiensis.

Previous Duke-affiliated research and work elsewhere favor the former argument. But backers of Homo floresiensis as its own species are vocally defending their claims.

The Palau findings likely won’t settle this hash. But Churchill (photo), an associate professor of biological anthropology & anatomy, says they add context in which to interpret the hobbit fossils.

His team also told the Times that its fossils support “at least the possibility that the Flores hominids are simply an island-adapted population of Homo sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.” Humans and other animals living on isolated islands often are of smaller stature than their mainland cousins -- a phenomenon known as island dwarfism.

Stay tuned to your local paleontologist.

Duke's Ties With Kenya Tested by Unrest

When political and ethnic violence erupted in Kenya last December after a bitter presidential election, the ripples reached Duke. A number of faculty and students had to put on hold several health and education programs in that country, located on the east coast of Africa.

But with the rival factions agreeing on February 28 to end the unrest, hope to jump-start the programs has emerged. Check here for a status report from the Duke Global Health Institute.

Among programs affected, a group of students was scheduled to travel to Kenya this summer to participate in WISER. Started jointly in 2006 by Dr. Sherryl Broverman of Duke and Dr. Rose Odhiambo of Egerton University in Kenya, this nonprofit organization is building the country's first girls' boarding school and research center, in the village of Muhuru Bay on Lake Victoria. Duke students had helped each summer -- and blogged about their experiences -- and the school, if plans hold, will open in 2009.

In another project, Dr. Jeff Wilkinson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, was is in the midst of extending Duke’s efforts to create a program in women's health in Kenya. The prospective plan is to work jointly with AMPATH -- the Academic Model for the Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS -- an ongoing partnership between the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Moi University School of Medicine in Eldoret, Kenya.

As a front-line report on AMPATH, one of its co-founders, Indiana's Dr. Bob Einterz (photo), spoke on March 6 at Duke at a University Seminar on Global Health. Check here for this insider's look at AMPATH's experiences during the turmoil and here for a recap of the lecture.

Dr. Einterz told many success stories, including that of Daniel Ochieng (photo), a 24-year-old medical student who was their first patient to survive and went on to lead the program's outreach efforts. And he said that thanks to the courage of AMPATH's many Kenyan employees, its clinics were not damaged and remained open during the violence.