Interdisciplinary Big Ideas

Sure, you love podcasts, but did you know that kids are also deeply engaged podcast listeners?Podcasts are emerging as a powerful tool for education. In fact, 94% of kids aged 6-12 who listened to a podcast in the last month say that they learn new things from podcasts, and 87% have shared things that they learned from podcasts with others. Lindsay Patterson will share insight gleaned from over a decade of leadership in kids’ educational audio and her team’s pioneering research into unlocking the potential of podcasts for young listeners and their families.

Negative life detections—when a method is unable to detect microorganisms in a given setting—can help us constrain the environmental limits of life on Earth. In surveying the literature for these instances and looking for those limits, we uncovered a range of natural environments where modern conventional methods did not find life. While these results inform our approaches to life detection methodology, they also outline challenges that complicate studies in extreme environments, which could be addressed through changes to experimental design and community norms.

In this talk, Dr. Mezzenzana put forward some tentative ideas about the relationship between early socialisation practices and a form of attention that she called alertness or wide attention. She referred to a kind of broad, open attention that perhaps falls better under the notion of alertness whereby the self is attentive to multiple actions and entities in her surroundings. It needs to be distinguished from the forms of focused, narrow attention that are typical of academic learning. Drawing on her anthropological research on early socialisation practices among the Runa in the Ecuadorian Amazon, she explored how different forms of cultivating attention could benefit the way we think about education especially at this time of climate crisis.

At Free University Berlin, employees, students, and neighbours act to promote biodiversity. From a sign in front of the zoology institute to 10 hectares of meadows and a biodiversity strategy for the university in 5 years – the initiative has caused a lot of change on campus!

Malley spoke on BIG (Batteri In Gioco, or “bacteria in play” in Italian), an educational card game designed to raise awareness about the human microbiota and the threat of antibiotic resistance. Through a dynamic assortment of cards and an accompanying app, players of all ages explore the diverse relationships between pathogenic, symbiotic, and commensal bacteria, promoting good habits and scientific understanding.

Lin and Hammond-Kaarremaa discussed integrating genomics and Indigenous knowledge to illuminate the life, history, and loss of Coast Salish woolly dogs.

The Mars Science Laboratory’s Curiosity Rover has been exploring Gale Crater, Mars since August 2012. The mission’s main goal is to explore the habitability of Mars – whether the planet once had all ingredients needed to support life (persistent water, sources of energy, sources of carbon), and what the environment is like today. Fraeman presented the latest findings from the rover and discuss how we operate and continue to explore Mars with Curiosity.

Evidence of how the human hand evolved is represented only by fossilized bony morphology, ranging from sparse, isolated hand bones to relatively complete, associated hand skeletons, and the archaeological record dominated by stone tools. Kivell reviewed this evidence, focusing on how the morphology of the early fossil human (hominin) hand has changed and the functional inferences we can draw from the fossil evidence, the features of the bony skeleton that are thought to reflect human-like dexterity, and the remaining gaps in our knowledge.

David shared and discussed FoodSeq. By amplifying and sequencing plant and animal DNA from human stool samples, FoodSeq allows us to enumerate over 450 plant and animal species that individuals regularly consume. He also addressed the potential connections between work in the genomics of food with fields ranging from anthropology to economics, globalization to public policy, and human health.

Projects developed in the Networked Mobilities Lab, namely the Mobile Networked Creativity project and the Pandemic Location-Based Game.

The Future of Video, Gaming and AI YouTube Video

Blurred Edges YouTube Video

Because human behavior is inherently complex, understanding the anthropological relationship with indoor space demands a multidimensional approach. In response, McCormick’s research explores the intersection between social systems, technological development, and human behavior in urban workplace design. Her forthcoming book, Inside OUT: Human Health & the Air-Conditioning Era (Routledge), delves into the socio-technological aspects of conditioned indoor spaces, advocating for healthy, human-focused architecture.

Scholars of regulatory governance know that law shapes markets, but to what extent does law shape organisms? Merck’s current book project presents a history of food safety regulation in the twentieth century, with a focus on the development of risk regulation in meat and poultry products. The book describes how the search for “safe” and “wholesome” chicken shaped future scientific and technical innovations, the nature of market competition, and even the biology of meat-type chickens.

The Integrated Bionic MicroSystems Laboratory (iBionicS Lab) at NC State has a vision to introduce conceptually novel neural engineering methodologies and wearable systems to interface artificial systems with biological organisms towards the next generation bionic cyber-physical systems and enable digital technology enhanced domestication, taming and communication tools. In this presentation insect-, canine- and mussel-technology interfaces and our efforts to use these for new citizen-science opportunities were be introduced for an intellectual discussion.

Soft robots for surgery and rehabilitation are the new frontier of robotics, but they are typically bulky, slow, and lack intelligence. To overcome those challenges, the first part of the talk presented an ultra-minimally invasive surgical robot that is significantly more dexterous than existing robots. The second part of the talk focused on learning-based control of soft exosuits that assist multimodal locomotion with superhuman performance to walk longer, squat more, jump higher, and swim faster.

• Here’s a 3-minute video summary of our results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imjj9VB-8dQ
• Project website: www.wellbeinginscience.com

Bram Kuijper talked about his work on stress response evolution. They focused on a recent paper considering how evolutionary history affects chronic stress.

Juliane Kaminski and Adam Hartsone-Rose have worked to understand the evolution of dog facial muscles in response to domestication. They told the story of their research on dog eyebrow muscles and then open into a broader discussion of the ways in which human preferences have shaped the ways in which domestic animals have evolved, particularly in the context of communication (and false communication).

Discussion of the ways in which the study of species that live in the nests of ants and their ecology and evolution might aid in our understanding of the species we have invited into our own homes, species such as domestic cats.

With 8 billion people on the planet, is there a limit to the number of people that can possibly engage with biodiversity? What would such a limit look like, and can we quantify it? At the very least, we know that there are many demographic barriers, and the majority of people currently engaging with nature come from higher sociodemographic contexts. Callaghan to discussed some of these questions, with the notion of brainstorming if we can identify these barriers, how would that look like? And how can we begin minimizing these barriers to nature engagement?”

Risk transfer (also called risk sharing) is the only risk management strategy which is obligately social, requiring formal or informal relationships among actors to take on a portion of each other’s risk, essentially insuring one another. In this talk, Aktipis discussed risk sharing and resource sharing across the societies that we study in The Human Generosity Project, drawing from fieldwork, computational modeling and laboratory experiments to understand the structure and function of risk sharing arrangements in small-scale societies.

Hathaway discussed his most recent book, What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. He also talked about how we can think in more agentive ways about other organisms, such as niche construction theory, to explore the diversity of approaches and debates out there on this front. 

Sanchez led an effort to develop new urbanization models for the southeastern U.S. that can also be applied more generally. These models are much more sophisticated than previous models in that they allow researchers to incorporate not only patterns of urban growth, but also flooding (or other change) as well as the extent to which people adapt to change. Here, she began a conversation that builds to the potential fall urbanization event in the fall.

Dunn talked through an idea for the fall of 2023, a public event in which the latest science was used to describe status quo patterns of urbanization and their consequences. Then, in addition, there were featured alternate visions of urban futures. Dunn took the first half of the meeting to talk about what such an event might look like. He then gave time for people to offer ideas about ideas they’d like to feature moving forward.

Bieker talked about her work using modern sampling and ancient DNA samples of herbarium specimens from the Danish Natural History museum to study the evolution of Scalesia plants in the Galapagos Islands.

Paige Madison was a visiting scholar at NC State. In 2003, a mysterious new “hobbit”-sized member of the human family was discovered in an Indonesian cave. It was described by some as “the most important finding in word paleoanthropology in the last 50 years” while others declared it “could be the big mistake of the century” and a sign that the field of human origins had “lost its way.” This talk recounted her research that uncovers the hidden story of the world’s smallest hominins, whose existence showed scientists a new way of thinking about ourselves as humans.

Allf created a database of animal feeding observations, drawn from citizen science data on iNaturalist, in order to build a global-scale food web. The project garnered ~3,000 contributions organically. Eventually, the idea is to allow anyone to search for a species and find all known instances of that species eating another species, or being eaten by another species.

Moore talked about her work and aspirations as she studies the relationship between flowers, yeasts and insect visitors. She is testing the hypothesis that yeast volatiles (aromas) attract specific pollinators to flowers which then pick up the yeast and carry it to new flowers (and sugar sources). This work involves lab trials, field trials, field observations and more.