In addition to capital punishment, Jim Acker has extensively studied wrongful convictions — that is, those moments when our justice system fails the accused in the worst imaginable way.

It’s a phenomenon inseparable from the death penalty debate because it represents a nightmare scenario: a life wrongfully taken as punishment for a crime the person did not commit.

These issues converged in the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys case, which Jim analyzed in his 2008 book Scottsboro and its Legacy: The cases that challenged American legal and Social Justice.

Like so much to do with capital punishment and justice in America, the Scottsboro Boys case —in which nine Black teenagers were accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama —was inseparable from the racial socioeconomic context in which it happened. It’s also an example of a time when the legal system ultimately spared the defendants from death but not the other devastating consequences of wrongful conviction, including lengthy imprisonments.

We asked Jim about the case in part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit. Here’s what he had to say.

Host: Did the Scottsboro Boys case change your understanding of capital punishment? Or did it more or less reaffirm what you already understood about the social, racial, socioeconomic forces that impact how the death penalty has been implemented in the United States?

Jim Acker: They were sentenced to death in circumstances that can only be described as reflecting the social racial prejudices of the time. It reaffirmed the ugliness of some of the aspects of the death penalty in terms of preying on African-Americans who had no fair chance in the Alabama courts at the time.

A New York lawyer actually got involved in the case after the first convictions were overturned, and Sam Liebowitz did a tremendous job, but it was hopeless. He was in front of the same kind of jurors in the same system.

Host: And they were nearly lynched before even getting into a courtroom when they were arrested, right?

JA: This is a classic case of wrongful convictions. The rapes never happened. The complaining witnesses lied, I think, pure and simple. But the rapes supposedly happened on a train that was going through northern Alabama, and word was given to the next train station down the way that this allegedly had happened. 

So there was a huge crowd that rousted all the African-Americans off the train. This is the start of the depression, people riding the rails. There were these nine guys, four of them knew one another, the rest didn't. They were just on the train. They all got rounded up and  hog tied. They got taken to a jail in Scottsboro, Alabama. Crowds gathered. The governor had to call out the National Guard. Yeah, it could have resulted in a lynching. As it was, it turned into a so-called legal lynching because the trials were a sham and there was no justice in the state of Alabama at the time. The U.S. Supreme Court twice had to overturn convictions of the Scottsboro boys, and while eventually none of them were executed, many of them spent years and years in prison.

Visit the National Death Penalty Archive in UAlbany’s M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives

That landmark 1972 case that Jim mentioned a few times, Furman v. Georgia? Here’s more background from Harvard Law School.

Read more of Jim’s take on the Hamm v. Smith case recently before the U.S. Supreme Court in his commentary published in the (Albany, N.Y.) Times Union.

And here’s an explainer on how the court dispatched the Hamm case in June without taking up the underlying issue, which could upend a quarter-century of settled law on whether executing people with intellectual disabilities constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Guerrero v. Johnson is the next case the Supreme Court will hear in its coming session regarding defendants claiming an intellectual disability. 

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Mario Sotomayor
Hosted and written byJordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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Over the last few weeks, the news cycle has once again been boiling with AI anxiety after revelations that lots of OpenAI agents teamed up on a hacking spree and warnings from a former Anthropic researcher that AI could “kill us all” within the decade.

That was before Anthropic released a report suggesting someone in a military lab may have been trying to use its AI to try to build a bioweapon, among other nasty potential uses of their tech.

Then, over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly called for a slow-down, or pacing, in AI development — a call echoed in some fashion by Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX.

In some ways, it’s a moment a lot like the one Blake Lemoine triggered with his controversial 2022 claims that Google’s LaMDA chatbot was sentient — only a lot bigger. The public’s attention is once again intensely focused on a technology most of us only lightly understand.

But is there an important distinction between whether AI is sentient (Lemoine’s claim) and whether it’s dangerous?

Because all this happened after we spoke to Alessandra, we went back to ask her take on it. Here’s what she had to say:

AB: The short answer is: The question of consciousness and danger are definitely separate in the sense that there are plenty of things that kill us without being conscious or wanting to cause us harm: bombs, earthquakes, hurricanes, diseases, etc.

The longer answer is that if AI ends up killing us all, it most certainly won't be because it gained consciousness and/or “decided” to kill us. What AI “does” is still exclusively the responsibility of the humans who built it, trained it, gave it objectives and unleashed it out in the world without enough safeguards in place. 

As far as I'm concerned, all these tech people raising these apocalyptic worries as if they created a monster they can no longer control is just an excuse to avoid taking responsibility.

Alessandra also made an interesting point about the way the science fiction stories we consumed as kids continue to influence our understanding of what’s possible now that some of those technologies are moving from the realm of fiction to reality.

AB: A lot of the discussion about AI and consciousness and sentience and all that comes from those sci-fi stories that we grew up with. And they really influence a lot of what we think is possible with AI right now. 

The simulation is an interesting case because you would even think that your body's not real. If I'm in a simulation, then all that I think I am and all that I think my world looks like, that's a lie. And at that point, if you think that that's a possibility, then conscious AI has also become a possibility. Because you could be mistaken about everything. And so even the things that sound completely implausible, why not?

Alessandra recently co-authored an article with UAlbany colleagues analyzing the apologies formulated by AI chatbots and why they’re meaningless – or,  without the moral weight of knowing right from wrong.

Here’s the May 2026 article we mentioned about how some LLMs have shown the ability to pass the Turing Test in brief, controlled interactions with humans.

Blake Lemoine has done many interviews about his claims that Google’s LaMDA is sentient. Here is one with Bloomberg Tech.

Google’s 2022 response, via The New York Times: “Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our A.I. Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. Some in the broader A.I. community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general A.I., but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient.”

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Interview and research by Bethany Bump
Photo by Patrick Dodson
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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In part of our interview that didn’t make the final edit, we spoke to Prabha in greater depth about a word that comes up a lot when talking about AI: reasoning.

It’s a word with very human connotations. We talk about behaving reasonably and reaching reasonable conclusions. But what does it mean when we’re talking about machines?

His answer was closely related to his argument about AI’s plurality. And if it sounds familiar, it may be because it echoes a point that UAlbany atmospheric scientist Kara Sulia made last fall when we discussed AI’s ability to transform how we understand the weather. AI’s great power, she said, stems not just from its ability to look deeply inside datasets but across them to help us make sense of a wider, more complex world.. 

Here’s what Prabha had to say:

JCE: The word reasoning comes up a lot. It’s a term that most people, until lately as AI has entered the popular conversation, consider a very human thing. I’m a reasonable person. I look at the information before me and I come to a reasonable conclusion. But what does it mean in the context of AI? What is the machine actually doing?

BP: I want to flip it around and ask you why you said, “I'm a reasonable person.” Why are you not saying I'm a good person or a bad person? Why are you saying I'm a reasonable person?

JCE: Good and bad seems more subjective to me. When I say I'm a reasonable person, I say I've looked at the information before me and I've come to a conclusion that is defensible based on that information. Is it the right conclusion? It might be. Is it the wrong conclusion? It might be. But is it a reasonable conclusion? That’s a different question to me — as a word person.

BP: So that is the gray area. You are unsure whether that's a correct conclusion or a wrong conclusion, but based on the data, based on the information that you have, based on the prior experience you have, you think you have arrived at a reasonable conclusion. That is something that the computers were not doing before AI because it was binary. It was one or zero, it was yes or no, it was true or false. Whereas now, when you have millions of records, now you reason through it and come up with a conclusion just like a human conclusion. And there is a probability associated with it; there is a confidence level based on this data, based on the amount of training. 

When I say the algorithm, the machine learning algorithm, has 90 percent confidence that this is the correct interpretation of the data, it is actually mimicking the real world, the way we look at the real world — the way we try to analyze and understand the world and derive conclusions, derive interpretations or make decisions.

JCE: The computers we have now and the computers that we're building now for the future can be trained on, and inference based on, billions of pieces of data —orders of magnitude that are difficult for regular people with non-mathematics degrees to really understand. Is that where AI derives its power from? The fact that it can reason based on enormous datasets?

BP: Yes and no. You're talking about data as one thing. Because data is like numbers, like database records of citizens and students and whatever. But you also have images, you have video, you have audio, you have gesture and movements, you have the sensor data and other things. So again, data is not one thing. Now the power of AI — yes, it comes from data, but it also comes from the ability to integrate these multiple sources of data and then reason through that information.

To read more of Prabha’s thinking on the plurality of AI, check out his essay on the subject in the first issue of the AI Plus Institute’s Hallucinations magazine. 

Lean more about the AI Plus Institute at UAlbany.

UAlbany biologist Morgan Sammons also touched on the curiosity that distinguishes humans from machines in our conversation last fall about the frontiers of brain-inspired computing.

Since then, UAlbany has hired four new faculty members in neuroscience, computer hardware engineering and mathematics who will focus on the intersection of neuromorphic and quantum computing. 

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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One of the most interesting gambling debates happening in New York right now is not about casinos (New York has long since legalized and licensed them), or mobile sports betting (also now legal, with some limits, since 2022). 

It’s about online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, which let users buy and sell so-called “event contracts” on things that may or may not happen in sports, politics, culture and the economy.

Like, say, will the U.S. go to war with Iran, or will the Los Angeles Angels defeat the Baltimore Orioles by more than 2.5 runs?

According to the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates these markets, event contracts are akin to other financial derivatives traded among users on commodity markets. One major difference from traditional betting is that there is no bookie or “House” setting the odds. The prices are set by the evolving consensus of the market.

But if buying and selling event contracts on whether the Angels will cover the point spread feels a lot like sports betting to you, well, New York State Attorney General Letitia James agrees.

James sued Kalshi for $36 billion in July alleging its operations amount to unregulated sports gambling in violation of New York law. New York had previously sued cryptocurrency firms Coinbase and Gemini Titan on similar grounds, and many states are pushing for greater regulation. 

Whether or not the markets meet the legal definition of gambling, they’re easily accessible via mobile devices and used by college students for many of the same reasons. 

We asked Jessica about that in part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit.

Host: I think of things that are not casinos — but well, maybe they are? Things like financial markets, things like crypto, or even prediction marketplaces. You can bet on almost anything. The technology has made it so easy. Should we be paying more attention to that now, maybe perhaps as we should have with the sports betting stuff a decade ago?

JM: Yes, we do ask that question in our research if students are engaging in that activity, and there's about a quarter of students who are. So it is happening, and it isn't illegal right now, and it isn't considered gambling, but that's the legal fight right now. 

It sure looks a lot like gambling, and this is maybe an opportunity to catch this before it really becomes a bigger issue like some of the other gambling activities have. Certainly, it looks like it's coming just the way that mobile sports betting did.

If you or someone you know is dealing with problem gambling or substance use, you can reach the NY HOPEline by calling 1-877-8-HOPENY (467369) or texting HOPENY (467369)

UAlbany's Counseling & Psychological Services and Office of Health Promotion have a wealth of resources for students. 

Know the Odds is another tool for understanding problem gambling, as is newyorkproblemgamblinghelp.org.

If you’re looking for help, the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS) has a tool to find nearby treatment programs and other services. 

If you’re interested in an in-depth look at how the legalization of sports betting happened so quickly in the United States, check out Michael Lewis’ podcast Against the Rules, which did an entire season on the subject.

Jessica’s other work, through a federally funded program known as Project ACCESS, has focused on HIV, substance use and suicide prevention. Read more about that here.

-----------------------------

***DARK MATTER UPDATE: Check out this update, newly announce this week, to February's episode on how UAlbany physicists are advancing the search for direct proof of dark matter. They found...something?

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photo provided
Hosted and written byJordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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In our interview, Sarah spoke about the role that social media platforms can play in making their spaces safer for users. Some of these options can be controlled by changing app settings, but Sarah argues that safety should be the default. 

SD: There are ways for users to change app settings that can make them safer to use. But platforms don't always make these choices easy to navigate — that's the first thing that needs to change. Plus, it can be unwieldy. In my work with children and teens, their parents share that there's so much information online about how to manage this, it can become overwhelming. And it's not just one platform; it's often multiple apps. Then the settings change, and you have to stay up to date with how to reset them. For parents, and adults too, it's a lot of work. So, how do we make it easier to automatically restrict content that may be inappropriate or harmful — for children and teens, and for some vulnerable adults too? If the automatic settings were more in line with what users want to see, that would be easier. Safety should come baked in; it shouldn't be something you have to go looking for and configure yourself.

Another thing platforms can do is focus more intentionally on user wellbeing. This is something that other researchers and I are working to understand. Instead of just reducing risk, can apps prioritize wellness? That's a real shift in design philosophy — building wellbeing into the platform itself, not just minimizing harm after the fact.

Centering kids is another important piece. It has historically been the case that children and teen users get considered after these apps are already developed, versus being centered from the start. Young users’ safety and experience with these apps should be part of the design phase, not an afterthought.

Considering the teen perspective — you work directly with young people, including discussions around their online preferences. What do teens want from social media platforms? 

SD: First, teens want ways to connect with others and share content they enjoy. Secondly, they don't want to see content that isn't in line with who they are and their values. So again, I think a lot of it has to do with wanting content that matches their values and identity. They also want to connect with their peers — real people, people they know. They don't want AI-generated posts that aren't real. They want authenticity. I think that's a concern for many people, not just teens. So much online content is fake these days, plus we're often the “product,” paying for these apps by viewing ads. Teens, like many of us, want real content and real connections.

With collaborators, Sarah has created a toolkit to guide users on best practices and healthy social media use. Explore their "mini course" here, or on Instagram.

Short on time? Here’s a quick summary of some of Sarah’s top tips for building a healthier relationship with social media: 

The American Academy of Pediatrics is actively developing resources for safe social media use among children and teens. See their latest recommendations in this guide. 

Learn more about what centering young users' online experience could look like and what teens want from social media. 

Check out this site for a closer look at why conversations around healthy social media use require a nuanced approach that considers benefits as well as risks. 

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 

Photo by Brian Busher

Interview by Erin Frick 

Hosted and written by Erin Frick

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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In this episode, Danny recounts his experience as an expert witness in a murder trial evaluating two competing sets of crime scene photographs of blood stains. What the photos showed (or didn’t) was a potentially significant detail in the case. 

More important for this conversation is the context: The photographs were originally shot on 35mm film and therefore theoretically beyond the reach of the digital and AI manipulation we fret so much about today.

But as Danny explained to the court and us, the notion that analog photos depict reality any more than digital ones has always been fantasy. What we think we see in photos, then and now, is as much about us, what we are told about them, and the innumerable unknown choices — like how to balance the colors in the image — made by those who produced them.

There seem to be parallels there to the so-called "CSI Effect," in which jurors' casual knowledge of forensic science fueled by popular culture has been blamed for creating unrealistic evidentiary standards in their minds while deciding actual cases. (This may or may not be true.)

Danny had more to say about his courtroom experience, and the way photographic evidence is used and interpreted in courtrooms more generally. The rest of the story, edited and condensed below for brevity, is worth a read. 

________________________________

DG: When developing a photo, there's such a thing as a standard color balance. However, there are a lot of things that affect the color temperature — the light under which it was photographed and if there was a window open at the time. There are a lot of things that affect decisions about exposure and shadows and highlights. I looked at the two sets of prints in this case, and I would not have balanced either set of prints the way they were balanced. 

The prosecution’s were way red. The defense’s were way cyan. The true, or at least the aesthetically correct, balance was somewhere in between. We also have to keep in mind that a photograph of something is not the thing itself. That's to say that you can't point to things in that frame and say what they are. It's a photograph of something. It's something that looks like a garage floor, and it's something that looks like some kind of stain. 

To make the leap to say not only what it is — what that substance is — but how old it is and how it got there, that's something we should laugh at. But this is the police and a forensic photographer. And they're official — they're experts. The jury hears this and believes they know how they use photographs. They hold it up like a window to reality and look and say, “I got it. See, this happened.”

At one point, the judge got frustrated with me. I had the viewing filters that a person uses to make color decisions about which way photographs should be developed. And if you stare through it — you hold a magenta filter up to your eye and you stare through it — eventually it looks fine. Your brain is adjusting in real time. Printers know you have to flash it in front of your eye — on, off, on, off, on, off — and then look at a card that tells you what to do. Dial in 10 points of magenta, or take it out. I showed the judge: here, look —motor oil, blood, motor oil, blood. And he's like, “You got one of those that makes it look like the Easter Bunny?” 

I said, “Well, no, I'm not saying that anything's possible. I'm saying that the argument that this represents unmediated truth is insane. It's a depiction. It's an abstraction. It's a two-dimensional photographic record of the way something looked at a time with all these other executive decisions that came into play.”

Check out Danny's personal website to learn more about his art, specifically Job/Security, a collaboration with UAlbany English Professor Edward Schwarzschild that examines the expanding U.S. homeland security sector through interviews and photographs.

He and Schwarzschild were interviewed about that project seven years ago on another UAlbany podcast.

Back to the topic at hand: Photography’s crisis of confidence is not new, and for evidence of that Danny pointed to the discovery that one of the most iconic photos in U.S. history —the flag raising on Iwo Jima —doesn’t show exactly what people thought it did for 70 years. 

Another striking wartime photo —Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War —has also inspired skepticism about its reported location and context.

For a more contemporary example, Danny pointed to the way photography, videography and AI shaped the public’s understanding of what happened during this year’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, in which two people were shot and killed by federal law enforcement.

If you haven’t yet, you should also check out last week’s episode of The Short Version on 19th-century spirit photography with Associate Professor of English Erica Fretwell, which perfectly set the stage this conversation.

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Interview by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 
Hosted and written by Erin Frick

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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There were so many interesting threads to this conversation that we couldn't include in the final edit, including Erica's take on whether folks in the 19th century knew William Mumler might be a grifter (yes) — and whether that really matters (maybe not).

Why do you think spirit photography took off? Were people not aware that technological trickery was being used?

EF: It actually was controversial from the beginning. In fact, William Mumler went on trial in 1869 for fraud. So from the get-go, it was controversial. People were immediately saying, “This is a hoax.” This is the era also of P.T. Barnum, so lots of trickery. But then there are also people saying, “No, this is real.” Those who believed it were primed in two ways. One, they probably were already what we called Spiritualists. Spiritualism was a religious movement that started in Rochester, New York, in the 1840s but really took off around the Civil War. Spiritualism is this religious belief that the living can communicate with the dead, that the dead do not leave, that their souls, in some way, remain on Earth with us. 

So already you have people who are open to this Spiritualist idea that the dead live among us and that we can access the dead. Combine that with the Civil War, America's bloodiest war to date. People were never not reading in the newspapers about the massive death toll or experiencing it themselves with family dying. We have Mathew Brady's Civil War photography being disseminated through mass media — images of deceased soldiers killed in battle. And so people would be especially primed to want to believe in these spirit photographs, both because of this already prevalent Spiritualist idea, not shared by everyone but widespread enough, that the living can communicate with the dead, and by the sheer toll of death, and how many people were experiencing grief on such a scale and trying to grapple with what this all means.

What are some famous spirit photographs you discovered during your research?

EF: The most famous one by far is Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband, Abraham Lincoln. This was taken in 1872 by Mumler. His reputation was already somewhat besmirched by the fraud trial from 1869, but if anyone has seen the Broadway show, Oh, Mary!, or knows much about Mary Todd Lincoln, she was very invested in the Spiritualist idea that you can communicate with the dead. So I think that was probably one of the more striking photos I saw. That photo was actually the one that got me thinking I really need to look into not just the technology behind the spirit photograph, but I also wanted to know what's the philosophical or scientific or religious principles that need to be in place for a spirit photograph to exist? And some of those principles that need to be in place are the Spiritualist idea that the living can communicate with the dead. If we didn't have Spiritualism, we wouldn't have spirit photography.

What’s the deal with aura photos?

EF: The colors these aura photos have go back to a kind of offshoot of Spiritualism that developed in the late 1800s and early 20th century. This was an offshoot called Theosophy, and it was started by a woman named Helena Blavatsky, who is American but spent a lot of time in India, and she more or less appropriated some Hindu and Indian religious beliefs in chakras and various kinds of belief systems, and came up with these colors. Theosophy believes in the unity of souls — we're all a universal human soul, everyone is connected through energetic matter. This all comes back to this Spiritualist idea of the soul as energetic matter, which we see happening in aura photography. So these pictures pick out the energetic matter and then the colors that are associated with particular kinds of electromagnetic waves, those colors are rooted in Blavatsky's theosophical philosophy of individual chakras and energy fields.

Erica also shared some of her favorite articles about spirit photography, including this 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article about what happened when an esteemed photographer and skeptic sat for a photograph in Mumler’s studio, and this 2019 History.com article on what became of Mumler after his 1869 trial for fraud. 

The Smithsonian Magazine article was adapted from The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost, a historical nonfiction book about Mumler written by Peter Manseau. 

Seeing Ghosts: A Brief Look at the Curious Business of Spirit Photography discusses the techniques employed by spirit photographers to create their images.

Spirit Photography and the Occult: Making the Invisible Visible looks at the role played by imaging technologies such as photography and X-rays in the history of the supernatural, and how photographers and scientists tried to use images to reveal a hidden world.

The Alice Austen House Museum published a brief history on aura photography and its connection to Helena Blavatsky’s 19th-century Theosophy.

Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association first book prize, Fretwell’s 2020 book, Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling, explores the history of psychophysics and how the science of the five senses offered late-19th century writers new conceptual foundations for representing lived experiences of racial and gender difference.  

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman and Zach Durocher
Interview and written by Bethany Bump

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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Sustainability conversations aren't just about high-minded principles of environmental stewardship. At their core, they are conversations about the mundane, largely unseen building systems that make our climate-controlled lives comfortable every day..

They’re also about policy choices and the political will to make important changes.

UAlbany’s Central Plant, for example, provides heat and hot water to much of the Uptown Campus through gas (and sometimes oil)-fired boilers that pump water at extremely high temperatures and pressures. Hot — as in in 385°F hot.

We got a closer look at that system and the people who maintain it in 2024 when a cracked weld in one of those high-pressure pipes forced the system offline for about 22 hours.

Occasionally leaky pipes aside, that fossil fuel-hungry technology represents the past. If UAlbany and SUNY are going to meet the carbon-reduction goals of New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, big changes need to be made. 

To that end, Indu and her colleagues across UAlbany and SUNY are working on ambitious decarbonization plans that would dramatically cut fossil fuel usage by electrifying heating, cooling and hot water delivery on campus. The University is currently seeking $37 million in state funding for the next phase of that project, which would include geothermal wells and new electric chillers and heat exchangers. 

That work would be in addition to plans for a new satellite Energy Hub and geothermal field serving UAlbany’s proposed Health Innovation & Technology Building on the other side of campus, which would help sustainably heat and cool adjacent buildings on the Academic Podium home to advanced research facilities. 

We already have a model for success. ETEC, UAlbany’s newest and first fully electric research and teaching complex, opened on the Harriman State Office Campus in 2021 and requires no on-site burning of fossil fuels.

In 2023, ETEC was named Green Building of the Year by the U.S. Green Building Council of Upstate New York.

Fittingly, ETEC is also home to most of UAlbany’s climate researchers and the students who will study climate change in the future.

What’s in a name?

To folks in Albany sustainability circles, Indu is a familiar name and face. And if you’ve worked with her (or just listened to this podcast), you’ve noted she goes simply by Indu — no last name, despite the fact that U.S. immigration officials (and our campus email system) have occasionally tried to assign her one. Typically it appears as “Lnu.” But that’s not Indu's last name; it's just an abbreviation for “Last name unknown.”

In part of their conversation that did not make the final edit, Indu explained to Maggie what her name means and its connection to her home in Tamil Nadu, India's southern-most state.

Indu: My full name is Indumathi, which means the light from the moon. I don't have a last name. My father decided against giving any of his children a last name because he did not want our last name to be associated with a caste, which it would have been. He did not want that. So I grew up my entire life with one name, and had no problems. But when I decided to come here to get my master's degree and I went to apply for a visa, the U.S. system would not allow a person with no last name because how else do you track this person? So they assigned me the last name “Lnu.”

UAlbany's Office of Sustainability has a wealth of information about sustainability on campus, including an online dashboard that tracks campus energy usage by building.

UAlbany’s decarbonization efforts have been supported by the New York State Energy Research Development Authority and were recently recognized by the New York League of Conservation Voters.

In 2024, UAlbany was cited as a top performer in the Sustainable Campus Index by the Association for the Advanced of Sustainability in Higher Education (ASHE). You can read UAlbany’s latest report here in ASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System.

In 2022, UAlbany completed the largest rooftop solar array in the entire SUNY system.

UAlbany's first geothermal building, Liberty Terrace Apartments, opened in 2012.

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Interview by Margaret Hartley
Hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

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In this week’s episode, Arun discussed how DNA nanostructures can be used for biotech as well as data storage. We asked about other applications being explored in the broader field of nanotechnology. As it turns out, materials science is fertile territory. There’s also growing interest in developing DNA barcodes.

ARC: Imagine a store where vegetables, produce or other plant or animal-based food items, all of which contain DNA, could be scanned using the DNA sequence within the item itself in lieu of a sticker. Why would this be helpful? Well, for one thing, this is an example of developing an alternative material, in the sustainability sense. Globally, we’ve already used up more materials than we should, so DNA is an alternate material that doesn’t cause environmental harm. And, since DNA is biodegradable, we don't have to worry about creating even more waste, or removing something that contains chemicals from our food before we consume it. These stickers might not seem like a big environmental problem, but they are made of plastic and glue and chemicals, so if we can use a different material instead, especially one that’s also biocompatible, that could be a good thing. And it’s not just about stickers; the bigger point is exploring DNA as a sustainable material that could potentially benefit other applications. 

I’m still picturing a futuristic grocery where you fill your cart, walk out the door, and everything is scanned, priced, and paid for automatically… 

ARC: So, yes, that’s the literal “barcode” connection. We can also extend the concept to disease diagnostics, though here the “barcode” becomes more of a visual signifier than a traditional barcode as we know it. 

For example, consider a strep throat or pregnancy test where the result readout consists of one or two lines to indicate positive or negative. I mentioned before how DNA data storage operates in binary – 1s and 0s – so we can use this system to indicate a positive or negative result for a given condition. This is something I worked on previously with Ken Halvorsen at the RNA Institute. We created a DNA-based assay where the result is a series of vertical lines, and each line encodes for a specific disease biomarker. The reason we did this is because we wanted to create a test to detect more than one biomarker or more than one disease in a single go. This could be especially helpful for DNA or RNA-based diseases which often require a complex assessment of multiple biomarkers to make a diagnosis. The readout for our assay took the form of five or six lines, each line representing presence or absence of a particular biomarker. Those lines, together, resembled a barcode. 

When it comes to creating DNA shapes, it doesn’t sound like much is off the table design-wise. For one, you mentioned DNA bunnies. What gave rise to the nano rabbit? 

ARC:The nanoscale bunnies were first made in Bjorn Hogberg's lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden in 2015. At the time, it was the first demonstration of making mesh-like structures using DNA and played a key role in advancing the technology that we’re working with today. (This Science Friday episode explains more.)

So, nano means small. Like really, really small. It takes trillions of DNA nanostructures to form a 3D DNA crystal, which only becomes possible to see with the help of a microscope. Take a look at some examples of DNA crystals from Arun's lab.

Arun mentioned his soft spot for pop culture references in academic works including journal titles (this one’s for the Potter fans). He even wrote an op-ed on the topic, published in the journal Matter. As for how to use a movie reference to help science make sense? Arun's own Fifth Element connection passed peer review muster. 

One of Arun’s first paths of nano-exploration as a grad student focused on studying DNA’s “handedness”. Learn more about what that means, and how it recently led Arun’s team to challenge long-held truths about the structure of DNA.

Together with UAlbany’s Associate Professor of Biology Cheryl Andam, Arun initiated the “Goggles and Galleries” science + art event series late last year. Check out student artwork on display at that event. You can also view a gallery of Arun’s journal cover art here.

Take a look inside Arun’s lab at UAlbany’s Life Sciences Research Building and learn more about his research and art.

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 

Photos by Patrick Dodson 

Interview and written by Erin Frick

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions?

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On his syllabus for a course called Realism and Climate Fiction, Mike Hill includes two texts that don’t — on their face —seem like obvious choices for a class exploring the emergence of cli-fi as a literary genre.

One is Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road and the other is Robinson Crusoe, the 1719 novel about a shipwrecked sailor, which not only pre-dates the cli-fi genre by about 300 years but also the modern notion of the novel.

Mike addressed both in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit. 

The Road is on your syllabus. You don't get told in that book what happened. You’re vividly experiencing the aftermath of some cataclysm through a father and son, but it's not explicitly a climate book. Why do you teach that book, and what do you teach about it?

MH: I really, really love that book for so many reasons, and it is not a climate fiction book, but it is one that allows us to tell a history that precedes climate fiction that connects with the lineage. That's the way genres work. Sometimes they organize things in retrospect. I think about a novel like Robinson Crusoe. It’s very much an ecological kind of fiction. Although in the same way it would not have been called a novel in 1719 when it was written, it would not have been called a climate fiction novel until now. 

The Road is not a cli-fi text; however, it has to do exactly with those themes you were talking about before regarding good guys and bad guys. Do you remember the relationship between the father and the son? First of all, they're nameless. It’s placeless, but it has a very profound sense of place. The narrative technique is very minimalist — a lot of just one word back and forth. It's like a Waiting for Godot meets I don't know what — Mad Max or something, right? And what the child is asking the father very often is: Are they good guys? Are they bad guys? And sometimes they can't tell, and sometimes they get mistaken as bad guys by good guys and vice versa. So there is that slippage too, in terms of how to survive, how to do better, how to do well. 

That novel could have ended with the death of the father, and we would've had a gloomy, unequivocally gloomy, text. But it doesn't. It continues. And in fact, there's a really interesting, very experienced, scarred-up survivor that comes in and gets in contact with the son after he has had this very reverential scene with his father. And the novel really begins where it ends. They say, “What are we going to now do out in the world?” And the prose opens up. It's no longer that minimalist kind of back and forth. And it seems to me to end with possibility,

It's uplifting?

MH: Well, I don’t know. At least it's not so down-putting that we stop in a fit of gloom. I think the ambiguity maybe is where the hope lies, to the extent there's hope. Because we don't want a hallmark ending, either. These aren't utopian forms of fiction. Neither are they dystopian. And so there is a sense of possibility. We have these futures that exist simultaneously. One is of existential doom, and the other is about survival and possibility. 

Mike explores the ecological themes in Robinson Crusoe more deeply in this article: “Close Reading at a Distance: Genre, Realism, and Ecology in Robinson Crusoe" 

He mentioned a lot of books during our conversation, including: Goat Days by Benyamin, Animal's People by Indra Sinha and Playground by Richard Powers.

He also mentioned Dan Bloom’s work to popularize the term cli-fi in the literary world. Bloom’s website documents those efforts.

Doom & Bloom Books has even more.

Mike’s most recent book is On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence, which explores “how demography, anthropology, and neuroscience have intertwined since 9/11.” His next volume in that project will be called Ecologies of War: Climate Change, Literary Realism, and Political Violence.

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Interview and episode notes by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
Photo by Brian Busher
Hosted and written by Erin Frick

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions?

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