Keep up with our core and affiliated faculty in the national and international news. Read their op-ed pieces, quotes and interviews, and cutting-edge research findings.
We love stories. We’d like to have all our knowledge packaged in stories — narratives with plots that involve people (and animals) with reasons and motives, carrying out their aims and designs, in cooperation or conflict, succeeding or being thwarted.
Science comes hard to most of us because it can’t really take that form. Instead it’s equations, models, theories and the data that support them. But ironically, science offers an explanation of why we love stories.
During three decades of success as one of the signature undergraduate initiatives at Duke, the FOCUS program of first-year seminars has continued to struggle with one big challenge: How to enroll more students from the Pratt School of Engineering, which had been part of FOCUS at its beginning but had taken a five-year hiatus.
At the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, Science & Society Director and Duke Law Professor Nita Farahany and other thought leaders gathered to discuss the use of smart drugs in our day to day lives.
And other unanswered questions about the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ new plan to reunite migrants separated at the border.
“DNA can be useful to verify claimed relationships and for detecting human trafficking. And it should be used on the border, but only with parameters that protect that information from being used for secondary purposes,” says Sara Katsanis, who studies genetic testing policy at Duke.