The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

Mari and Dimitri interview student researchers at the 16th annual Graduate Academic Conference (GAC), hosted by the Council of Graduate Students (COGS). The second episode of this four-part series features interviews with Roselane Kithan-Lundquist,  and Ifeanyichukwu Eke from MSU's Microbiology department , and Simon Sanchez from the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Mari and Dimitri interview student researchers at the 16th annual Graduate Academic Conference (GAC), hosted by the Council of Graduate Students (COGS). The first episode of this four-part series features interviews with Sam Norcia and Char Dengler from the College of Nursing, and Bismarck Amaniampong from the Department of Chemistry.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Veona Cutinho. Veona works in the Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory at MSU led by Dr. Jose Cibelli. She works with zebrafish embryos and manipulates them so they can be ideal donors for cloning. These tiny embryos are perfect for studying cloning because their development is quick, easy to see, and happens outside the body! While cloning was once a big deal, it's kind of old-fashioned now because it's tough to get it just right. Veona and team at the Cellular Reprogramming Lab  are trying to figure out what the problem is. She's focusing on a troublemaker called H3K9me3, a protein that makes cloning less efficient. By understanding and dealing with this protein, Veona hopes to make cloning much smoother and better. It's like upgrading an old invention to work faster and smarter!

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Yunting Gu is a PhD candidate in linguistics from Michigan State University. Her research in speech production suggests a basis for several universals regarding the sound pattern of languages.

Despite the differences in languages, some sound patterns are common to most languages of the world. For example, cross-linguistically, syllables starting with pl are more frequently observed than syllables starting with pt, which is more frequent than syllables starting with lp. Also, syllables that have a consonant followed by a vowel (such as so) are more common across different languages than syllables which is a vowel followed by a consonant (such as an). The question is — where do the observed linguistic universals come from? There are two possible answers. First, it may merely be a coincidence that languages share some patterns. Second, linguistic universals may come from some shared property of human beings.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Kiyotaka Suga, a PhD candidate in Second Language Studies.

One of the engaging questions for second language (L2) teachers is how to introduce grammar instruction to help adult L2 learners develop their well-balanced communicative abilities. Most L2 teachers may believe intuitively that engaging in output (speaking and writing) practice in L2 classrooms is crucial for adult L2 learners to develop their productive skills. Despite such common beliefs about output practice, the roles of output in L2 grammar acquisition have not been fully explained with empirical evidence. Previous studies that investigated the roles of output practice for L2 grammar learning have reported mixed results, which were limited due to their primary reliance on indirect measures of grammar learning processes (e.g., note-taking, underlining, and retrospective interviews). Since these indirect measures may not have fully captured learners’ learning processes (i.e., how output practice in L2 classrooms can allow learners to pay more attention to the target grammatical feature that they are learning), it is valuable to employ a more sensitive online objective measure (i.e., eye-tracking) to further examine the roles of output in L2 grammar acquisition. 

In his dissertation study, Kiyo is using eye-tracking to examine how engaging in L2 output practice can push adult L2 learners to pay more attention to grammar features that they are learning and then eventually facilitate their grammar learning. The findings of this study will clarify the roles of output practice in L2 classroom instruction with empirical evidence. Pedagogically, the findings will allow L2 teachers to incorporate empirically-based output practice into their daily teaching practices.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!

Bryan Stanley is a PhD student in the Physics Department. He does Physics Education Research (PER), where he primarily studies informal physics programs. Informal physics programs create physics learning spaces outside of the traditional classroom settings. Examples of these types of programs include, but are not limited to, summer camps, planetarium shows, public lectures, student groups, science festivals, and open houses. The events that these programs host are sometimes called public engagement or outreach. These types of programs can impact and support youth and adult audiences and university student volunteers in building their science identity, sense of belonging, and sense of community. Bryan studies the structures of informal physics program to better understand the fundamental aspects of these spaces and to help support informal physics practitioners. He also studies how these programs impact their university student volunteers, finding that volunteering can influence students' career paths.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

When you get a scrape or cut, you might reach for a tube of Neosporin, but have you ever wondered what exactly this antimicrobial ointment does to bacteria, or how bacteria might avoid being killed? Bacteria possess a dizzying variety of specialized protein machinery that help them resist our medicines, complicating treatment of infection. Natasha, a graduate student in the department of microbiology and molecular genetics, studies these antibiotic resistance machines with the help of cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that uses high-powered microscopes and frozen samples to capture snapshots of protein molecules in action and build 3D models that reveal their intricate structures. This visual approach can help us make sense of microbial behavior, understand why certain antibiotics are not effective on some types of bacteria, and hopefully help us develop more effective medications to treat infections.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Blood transfusions can be life-saving procedures for patients in need. However, they can also impart much more devastating complications, leading to poorer outcomes than prior to transfusion, such as infection, inflammation, and even death. This is in part due to the red blood cell “storage lesion”, which refers to the irreversible metabolic and physiological damages that occur to red blood cells (RBCs) during their storage period, such as membrane damage, protein/lipid oxidation, glycation, cell lysis, and many other detrimental changes vital to proper RBC function. Logan Soule is a 5th year PhD candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Logan’s work focuses on attempts to alleviate the development of the storage lesion. His lab believes that a culprit behind these damages is the significantly high sugar content in RBC preservatives, which is 8x higher than diabetic patients. His work highlights the benefits of storing RBCs at physiological glucose levels, leading to exceptionally better RBC functionality than traditional hyperglycemic storage. However, normoglycemic storage requires “feeding” the cells with a concentrated glucose solution as the RBCs metabolize the glucose, limiting this technique’s application, until now. Logan has designed and implemented an automated glucose feeding device to successfully maintain normoglycemic conditions of stored RBCs. These findings implicate exciting changes in transfusion medicine that are more feasible than ever before. Storing blood under normoglycemic conditions is now not only possible but has significant potential to lead to better patient outcomes.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Period poverty is an important, yet often ignored, public health crisis. The social shame and steep cost of menstrual products often push low-income people to adopt unhygienic practices during menstruation, negatively impacting their health, education, and dignity.
 
Specifically, period poverty significantly impacts young menstruators in universities. The lack of access to menstrual hygiene products forces many students to resort to rags, paper towels, toilet paper, and other substitutes, increasing the risk of several reproductive health issues. According to a study conducted by Days for Girls, about 25% of menstruating students struggle to afford menstrual products. The emotional toll from the deep-rooted stigma surrounding menstruation along with the inaccessibility of menstrual products negatively impacts the self-perception and mental health of students. BMC Women’s Health estimated that 68% of college students who experience period poverty also experience moderate to severe depression.

Nupur and Harsna worked with the Department of Epidemiology and MSU College of Human Medicine Public Health professors to create and roll-out a survey identifying demographic factors, accessibility factors, and perceptions on menstruation of Michigan State menstruators. Their results confirmed the need and benefit for an increased accessibility to free menstrual products at Michigan State University. Mission Menstruation X MSU successfully communicated these findings to MSU Administration, securing over 200 university-funded free menstrual dispensers across campus in women’s and gender-neutral restrooms.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube! 

Alyssa studies the reproductive biology of African electric fish, called mormyrids, with a focus on their sperm and eggs. These freshwater fishes are found throughout lakes and river throughout the African continent and are used by research laboratories across the globe to study questions in evolution, neuroscience, behavior, and other biological disciplines. Besides their amazing ability to produce electricity, these fishes are also unique in that their sperm cells lack tails. Almost all animal sperm cells have a tail that allows them to swim to eggs to achieve fertilization, but the sperm of these fish do not! This is the only known case of tailless sperm evolving within a vertebrate lineage (it has evolved within 35 other lineages, but all of them are invertebrates). It is unknown what caused mormyrid sperm to lose its tail and how their sperm is still able to travel to and fertilize eggs. Furthermore, the morphology of mormyrid sperm has been known since the 1970s, but very little is known about mormyrid eggs. Alyssa's work aims to understand how mormyrid sperm lost its tail, how their sperm is still able to fertilize eggs, and to characterize the morphology of the previously ignored female gametes.

If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at [email protected].  Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!