The Sci-Files on Impact 89FM

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Gregory Hess. The U.S. electrical grid, the system of control centers, substations, poles, and wires that provides electricity to almost all American homes pre-dates the computer and Internet revolutions. Introducing computers to the operation of this grid allows for the grid to react faster than any human being could, either to protect itself, heal itself, or turn itself off to avoid some physical disaster. The demand for these computing systems and how they communicate pushes the very limits of modern digital communications. In addition, the computers at the end of those communications must be protected to avoid them being misused in ways that could be anything from inconvenient to disastrous. Greg’s research seeks to use modern computer networking technology to address these two issues. Lab tests confirm that Intent Based Networking can allow computer networks to dynamically configure both to meet the daunting communication needs of the end devices as well as protect those devices from accidental misuse or purposeful hacking.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!  

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Philip Engelgau. Philip's research aims to understand how banana fruit is able to synthesize its characteristic aroma compounds. The chemicals that banana fruit produce and that we sense as banana-like are derived from the same metabolic routes as valine and leucine, common, primary metabolites that are essential to the day-to-day metabolism of not just bananas, but all living things. As bananas ripen, they accumulate valine and leucine simultaneously with the production of banana-aroma volatiles. However, not all is as it seems. Both valine and leucine are normally under strong feedback regulation which should prevent the stark increases that have been observed in banana fruit. This paradox suggests that banana fruit are able to somehow uniquely overcome this inhibition in order to generate these aroma chemicals. Philip's work investigates how alternative splicing, a mechanism that creates variability in how genes are expressed, of the two rate-limiting enzymes of valine and leucine biosynthesis may be leading to versions of these enzymes with compromised regulatory regions. These unregulated enzymes are likely able to produce copious amounts of valine and leucine in banana fruit and thus provide a means for the production of the banana's unique smell.
 If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Claire Kopenhafer.
The Hubble Space Telescope has given us many gorgeous images of galaxies, with bright stars and swirls of dust, but there's a lot more going on than we can easily see. Stars are born out of compressed gas, and gas is constantly flowing in and out of galaxies. Most of this gas cannot be seen in Hubble's pictures, but its impact is profound. Claire uses computer simulations to study how this flow of gas affects a galaxy's ability to form stars: allowing it to form more, or cutting it off entirely. These simulations use what we understand about the laws of physics to make predictions and interpretations for telescope observations.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Alassane Sow. Alassane is an undergraduate researcher working in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics currently working on germinating symbiotic and parasitic fungi in the order Pezizalies. They are also a part of a nationwide project that focuses on creating a way to consistently grow Morels outdoors and in high tunnels.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Brooke Devries. Brooke is a second-year Ph.D. student working with Dr. Hanne Hoffmann. Her research focuses on daily rhythms in the body called circadian rhythms. You'd be surprised at how many things, from sleep to metabolism, to mood and energy, have predictable rhythms throughout the day! These rhythms are all coordinated by a tiny area in the brain referred to as the SCN. The SCN gets light input from the eyes, coordinating these rhythms to the time of day. So what happens when light input is altered?
Brooke's research focuses on how the changes in the SCN changes normal hormone levels and mood when light exposure is changed. 
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Azam Ali Sher. Azam is a dual major Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Medicine and Integrative Biology (CMIB) & Environmental Sciences and Integrative Toxicology (EITS), and a BEACON research fellow at Michigan State University. There are around 3 million infections and 36,000 deaths caused by antibiotic-resistant (AR) bacteria in the USA (CDC, 2019), and many disease-causing bacteria are resistant to several different antibiotics. Many bacteria carry their antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) on conjugative plasmids, small pieces of DNA that can be freely transferable to normal bacteria or pathogens in their natural habitats, such as the human gut. However, little is known about the transfer of these ARGs among bacteria in nature. Azam’s Ph.D. research in Dr. Linda Mansfield’s lab focuses on studying the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance among human gut bacteria. He addresses a high-impact but straightforward question: what happens if one bacterium with these transferable drug resistance genes colonizes a human gut. He uses laboratory mice with transplanted human gut microbes and colonizes them with bacteria carrying fluorescently labeled ARG plasmids. He then uses advanced molecular techniques to follow the transfer of plasmids to the resident bacteria after colonization. This study will uncover what kinds of bacteria can donate and receive ARGs in the human gut. Azam says that this kind of study will be used to help find some solutions to halt the development of multiple drug-resistant bacteria in the gut and other environments. If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Megan Mikhail. Megan’s research focuses on the intersection between biological and environmental risk for eating disorders, with a particular focus on underserved and marginalized populations. Historically, eating disorders have been stereotyped as “vanity disorders” that predominantly affect advantaged (i.e., white, wealthy) individuals. Unfortunately, these stereotypes have led to the increased stigma around eating disorders, and limited access to care for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In research including a representative sample of over 6,800 youth from the state of Michigan, Megan found that eating disorder symptoms were significantly greater in youth experiencing familial and neighborhood disadvantage. Moreover, genetic influences on eating disorder symptoms appeared to be expressed earlier and more strongly in these youth. Contrary to stereotypes, Megan’s research suggests that children and adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds may be at elevated risk for eating disorders, especially when they also have genetic vulnerabilities. Their research highlights the urgent need for access to screening and treatment for eating disorders for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who are currently underserved.

Press release from MSU describing one of Megan’s recent studies: https://socialscience.msu.edu/news-events/news/2021-12-13.html

For people who may be worried about their food or eating, the National Eating Disorders Association offers support and resources: https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/

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

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Serena Lotreck from MSU's Plant Biology & Computational Mathematics, Science & Engineering. Serena’s research is focused on helping researchers in the plant sciences navigate the flood of available information when designing new hypotheses and experiments. Since the 1980s, there has been a 3% increase per year in scientific publishing, leading to an overwhelming amount of available articles for scientists to navigate when beginning a new project. Currently, researchers rely on labor-intensive manual methods to manage this flow of information, like reading individual articles from the search results of an academic search engine in order to generate a new hypothesis. Knowledge graphs are representations of information automatically extracted from a large quantity of unstructured text like scientific papers, where real-world objects are represented as the nodes of the graph, and the connections between nodes are the relationships between those real-world objects. For example, in molecular biology, the nodes are things like proteins or genes, and the edges are relationships like "upregulates" or "inhibits". New nodes and edges can be predicted on these graphs, which generates novel scientific hypotheses based on a greater percentage of existing information than could be achieved with a manual literature search. The goal of Serena’s research is to adapt existing methods for building knowledge graphs for the plant sciences and to develop a framework for using these knowledge graphs for hypothesis generation. If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Maria Milan from MSU's Civil and Environmental Engineering. Rural Alaskan communities face challenges unique to other areas in the United States. Energy usage and costs are high due to the shipping of materials and cold winters. Many communities are in need of more efficient housing to combat the cold weather and provide a safe, comfortable indoor environment. Maria's research took her to a remote community on Alaska's west side, where she performed energy assessments on 27 homes and held interviews with many of these homeowners to talk about housing concerns and future housing. She compiled her data into summaries that were shared with the community and housing director in hopes of future grant funding for new homes.
Listen to learn about challenges faced by rural Alaskan communities and how these challenges can be addressed in future housing. If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube! 

On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Paul Bylsma from MSU's Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education. This thought project discusses the simultaneous proximity and distance that most of us in the academic world felt as a result of COVID online learning. Paul and his collaborators use a unique theoretical lens that foregrounds the role of the body in learning to describe how being visually present online is not enough to replicate the physical presence that we took for granted in in-person learning. For example, our squares in a Zoom room were super close, and we (typically) had no problem seeing and hearing each other. But Paul's research explains how such visual proximity is betrayed by irreconcilable distances masked by technology. If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected]. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!