Joseph Fernandez-Moure wants to free you. He wants to get you out of jail. But he’s not baking a cake with a file in it; he wants to get you out via injection.

So, no, he’s not talking about the I’ve-committed-a-crime jail, of course. The metaphorical jail this trauma surgeon is talking about comes from the limitations people face when they suffer one of the least-studied injuries people encounter: rib injuries.

Slow-growing microbes in peat bogs in the lazy South break down organic matter much more slowly than their northern relatives, making them much better carbon sinks and more effective in preventing the release of greenhouse gases than their counterparts further north.

The weather was easy—mid-seventies and pleasantly sunny—and the windows were down as the three friends departed West Campus in a cramped Uber backseat, headed for the Eno River.

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in the Duke School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, offers an analogy for perceptions of mental health. “There’s this continuum between night and day, and there’s this moment, dusk, where you can’t really tell the difference between night and day.” Dusk suggests that there is no absolute of either; that it’s a question of degree.

The catalyst: Assistant professor of chemistry and physics Patrick Charbonneau and visiting chef Justine de Valicourt not only share a history (Charbonneau and de Valicourt first met in their native Québec), but also a passion for cuisine. After a year of brainstorming, they are hitting the kitchen to cook up a freshman seminar class that infuses scientific savvy into tasty payoffs.

After twelve years of teaching introductory and organic chemistry at Duke, Stephen Craig ’91 knows many of the most important moments in his students’ learning don’t happen in the classroom.

“They occur at 2:30 in the morning, in the commons room of their dormitory, probably the night before an exam,” laughs Craig, a professor and chair of chemistry. “It’s when students are trying to work through the material together.”