Using DNA methylation data from The Cancer Genome Atlas, I compared healthy noncancerous cells from African Americans with healthy noncancerous cells from European Americans. The goal was to see if there was a feature in the healthy African American cells that would make them more vulnerable to lung cancer.

While there were differences between the cells, they weren’t significant enough to drive the disparity in cancer rates.

Understanding these results led me to set up another analysis independent of race. Again, I looked at DNA methylation, chemical tags that can silence or turn off a gene. I found that two genes in people with cancer have fewer chemical tags. Without those tags, these genes express themselves in a louder voice than ones with more chemical tags.

This is important because there are drugs that can target a specific gene. I also found that the affected genes affected different cellular pathways of the study cohort.

The same cancer doesn’t always present itself the same way in different patients.

Return to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research feature.

The post Why Do African Americans Have Higher Rates of Lung Cancer? appeared first on Academics.

In return for needed energy infrastructure, Asian governments feel an obligation to back China diplomatically. China needs support to suppress local separatist movements and promote its Belt and Road Initiative, China’s grand plan to connect over 60 countries along the Old Silk Road and beyond.By  example, in 2013 China invested in an unprofitable oil field in Kazakhstan. In return China received strong support for using Kazakhstan as one of its key points in the Belt and Road Initiative.

Because China is using energy projects to increase influence, global leaders must change the way they view China’s involvement in foreign  countries. It’s imperative for policymakers and diplomatic leaders to become aware that China’s energy projects are not gestures of goodwill.

The whole tension between the U.S. and China is about who should be the dominant superpower in Asia. Without a firm grip on understanding how energy is being used as a political tool, world leaders won’t fully understand how the world is evolving.

Return to the feature on the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.

The post Questioning China’s Energy Projects appeared first on Academics.

Many developing countries work to attract this type of investment because it comes with many benefits, including greater economic growth, job opportunities, and secondary business development. Although the amount of FDI in developing countries has increased greatly over the past several years, not all developing countries are successful at attracting it. In studying 71 developing countries, I find that inflation targeting policy helps attract greater FDI flows.

This policy separates a country’s central bank from its central government. Such autonomy allows the bank to operate much like the U.S. Federal Reserve, adjusting interest rates during times of recession and boom, but not bowing to pressure from elected officials. Such a policy attracts FDI because it lends a degree of credibility that investors seek because their investments are more likely to remain safe, even during times of uncertainty and instability.

In fact, according to my research, FDI remains strong in developing countries during times of financial crisis if an inflation-targeting policy is in place, especially when compared to countries using different monetary policies. This is good news for developing countries who seek investments to help stimulate their overall economy even during troubled times.

Return to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research feature.

The post How Foreign Direct Investment Helps Developing Countries appeared first on Academics.

In what is called brood parasitism, some females will lay their eggs in another bird’s nest, relinquishing all parental care of their offspring to the host female. Rearing a parasitic nestling, however, reduces the chances of survival for the host bird’s offspring. The best thing for a bird to do is remove the foreign egg before it hatches.

But how do birds identify an egg that’s not their own?

My research partner, Claudia Ki, and I were curious as to what visual cues signaled a foreign egg to female birds.

To find the answer, we placed plastic eggs resembling those of a house sparrow in the nests of 14 eastern bluebirds at our local field site. Eastern bluebirds lay eggs that are light blue-green in color. House sparrows lay eggs with brown speckling on a whitish-blue background. We isolated the colors and pattern of those eggs and created four models: whitish blue, brown, an equal ratio of both colors, and a replica of the house sparrow egg.

Each day we’d check the nest boxes at our field site. What we found is that some females rejected one or more of the model eggs, while others accepted all variations and left them in their nest. Females who rejected at least one fake egg always picked the speckled one. This led us to conclude that pattern rather than color is how birds identify parasitic eggs.

One possibility as to why a female was more likely to reject the patterned egg over the other models is due to the contrast between the speckles and the color of the egg. In the low lighting of the nest box, the contrast between the light and dark colors in a speckling pattern stand out. The other eggs might have blended with the female’s own clutch or the brown color of the nest material.

As for birds that didn’t reject the intruding eggs, they might not have noticed a difference between their own or the effort to remove them was too high.

Return to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research feature.

The post Sorry, But I’m Not Your Mother appeared first on Academics.

But how does the adversity and stress we experience in childhood affect our minds, particularly our ability to absorb information and retain it?

Our study set out to learn more about the effects of early-life adversity by examining the colorful little Australian bird known as the zebra finch. Scientists had earlier looked at how developmental stress on males affected their ability to learn to sing. Male zebra finches use their songs to attract females. They learn how to sing from their elders. Likewise, the females learn how to perceive the songs from older male finches. But while plenty of studies have looked at the male end of the equation, few studies have examined how females learn what makes a good song. And little work has been done to check out the neural changes in the animals’ brains.

We subjected our test birds to nutritional stress during their childhood by mixing seeds they consume with wooden chips, which means we increased the amount of time it took for their parents to find food, thereby decreasing the amount of food the little birds got. Birds who grow up with added stress at mealtime would have smaller brains, or less cellular density in key areas, we hypothesized.

So during childhood and again during adulthood, we examined brain sections of our test group, particularly the part of the brain that controls the bird’s listening ability.

And we discovered we were wrong; the bird brains hadn’t changed. That doesn’t mean we failed; in the world of neuroscience disproving a hypothesis can be just as valuable, if not more so, than confirming one. Studies like this one can help us understand how adversity early in life can affect our ability to learn and remember.

Return to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research feature

The post Does Nutrition Affect Bird Brains? appeared first on Academics.