I attended my first astronomy conference in high school and I’m not ashamed to admit I understood less than a tenth of what was said at the meeting. This meeting was a small conference dedicated entirely to discussing new science which could be done with a telescope that was little more than concept art at the time, and even now is still not operational. Even though I was the youngest there by at least ten years and felt woefully out of place, I still remember a surprising amount. A few months ago, I saw a poster for the latest in this conference series and dug out the notes I took during that first meeting. Curiously enough, they make a lot more sense now that I’m a graduate student in Astronomy. Seeing the notes from my high school self reminds me what a long process science can be, and I would’ve never gained this viewpoint without attending this small conference. (more…)
Inching toward a cure for PTSD
Dr. Yvonne Lai is well known for her work at IU’s Gill Center for Biomolecular Science. However, she and her collaborators are also making waves in the business world with the growth of their startup company Anagin Inc., a promising pharmaceutical venture located in Indianapolis.
Dr. Lai’s research focuses on novel drug therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is a common neurological disorder that affects seven to eight percent of the population. Available treatments come with a disturbing list of side effects and do not target the disorder’s underlying neural mechanisms. Tackling this problem has been a long journey for Dr. Lai. Now, with the help of a new grant, solutions seem closer.
The grand challenge to prepare Indiana for environmental change… and the hope behind it
Typically when you think about a bunch of academics discussing environmental change, it has an air of doom and gloom. The projections aren’t promising: the global temperature is predicted to rise 0.2 °C each decade, resulting mainly from anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases, and this will continue to result in rising sea levels and unpredictable, catastrophic weather events. Many people are left feeling hopeless with a feeling of “it’s too late.” But thanks to President Michael McRobbie’s decision to fund Grand Challenge Proposals and the ensuing advent of the Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) at Indiana University, there is a new reason for hope in Indiana.
The institute has one clear primary mission: to prepare the state of Indiana for the inevitable environmental change that it will face in the coming decades. The visionaries behind the ERI include faculty hailing from departments and schools all across the IU campus, including the Department of Biology, The Media School, the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, the Department of Geography and more. Everyone involved shares a common interest in protecting the natural world and improving the resilience of our state to the inevitable march of climate change. But to break up the mission of the Grand Challenge Proposal into more manageable goals, researchers teamed up into working groups to define goals that were of equal importance in preserving our state’s beauty and preparing the economy for environmental change, including: predicting changes in weather projections, conserving animals and plants, protecting humans against invasive species and disease vectors, promoting urban green infrastructure, and fostering better communication of future challenges (e.g. flooding, crop loss) to the communities across Indiana. (more…)
President Trump calls for the re-establishment of mental asylums: A discussion of deinstitutionalization.
Following the school shooting in Florida at the end of February, President Trump advocated for the re-establishment of “mental asylums”, also known as psychiatric hospitals, citing a much-needed improvement of the mental health system and as a solution to gun violence in America. In order to contextualize the President’s claims, in this blog post, I’ll delineate a movement in the 1950’s known as deinstitutionalization and discuss the impact that had on our current mental health and criminal justice systems and policies.
The universe full of exoplanets
Our understanding of the formation of planetary systems has historically been based on the observations about our own Solar System. A planet is a roughly spherical object orbiting a star that has sufficiently strong gravity to clear its orbital path of other debris. The four terrestrial planets (Earth, Venus, Mercury, and Mars) of our Solar System are located in the inner region relatively closer to the Sun, whereas the four giant, or Jovian, planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are located in the outer region relatively farther away from the Sun. If our solar system is typical of other solar systems, then we can conclude that giant planets are formed and located in the outer regions of a planetary system, while terrestrial planets are formed and located in the inner regions.
An exoplanet is a planet outside our Solar System. Over 3500 exoplanets have been confirmed to date, and we believe that exoplanets are ubiquitous in the universe and that there are probably more exoplanets in the universe than stars. It is 100% certain that an average Solar-type star harbors at least one planet. Also, our current detection technology does not allow us to find smaller planets, such as planets the size of Mars and Mercury, but that may change with future observations. Many exoplanets have physical and orbital characteristics very unlike that of our own Solar System’s planets. They are so different in fact, that scientists have come up with distinct categories for these exoplanets. (more…)
Getting to the root of the global carbon cycle
Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in our atmosphere continue to rise, and global warming has transitioned from a possible future phenomenon to a present environmental reality. Given this reality, scientists are motivated to improve calculations of how much carbon there is on Earth and how it flows from the biosphere to the atmosphere and back to the biosphere. This understanding of how carbon moves through our Earth system will help scientists develop better strategies to mitigate the effects of global warming on our natural and built environments.
On land, much of the carbon in soils originates from plants. Recall that during photosynthesis, plants take in CO2 from the atmosphere and convert this carbon into sugars to enhance plant growth (an example of a carbon flux from the atmosphere to the biosphere). Then, when these plant tissues die and begin to decompose, the carbon again moves from one pool to another. Some of the carbon will be released back to the atmosphere, but about half of the carbon from the decomposing plant will get incorporated into the soil. This movement of carbon from the atmosphere, to the biosphere and then eventually to the pedosphere (the soil) is fundamental to the global carbon cycle. To understand this cycle, we must be able to estimate how large the plant carbon pool is.
Antibiotic resistance: Real concern or fake news?
The author is ScIU guest writer Krystiana Krupa, a graduate student in IU’s Department of Anthropology.
So let’s talk about these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, otherwise known as superbugs. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are bacteria that cannot be killed by pharmaceutical drugs that would normally be effective. While many of us know that superbugs exist and are becoming more problematic (think MRSA or E. coli), we often don’t think that they pose any special risk in our personal lives. Are superbugs something we should really be concerned with, or are they another kind of “fake news” in the form of a public health scare? My answer is YES, we should be concerned because NO, they are not “fake news.” (more…)
Interwoven Threads
A profile of IU professor Sharlene Newman in celebration of Black History Month
Any glance at the demographics tells us that African American women are among the least represented of any group in STEM disciplines. Such is true in the field of psychological and brain sciences, where Sharlene Newman is the only African American professor in her department. It is even rarer to find black female professors in the sub-field of cognitive neuroscience.
Yet, the path to science was in many ways etched onto Sharlene’s future. From kindergarten on, it was clear to all her teachers that Sharlene was just plain good at math and science. “You should be an engineer,” she was told, so often that it became an undisputed fact, something she “didn’t even have to think about.” Add to that the mesmerizing talents of a young uncle, who “once built a radio for class and could fix anything.” To which her response was simply, “I want to do that.”
At the same time, the issues of African American life and history, as they extend back in time and into the future, remain ever-present around her. Like a set of interwoven threads, her own history intersects with some of the most iconic people, places and events of African American history, as it unfolded in the tiny southeastern Alabama town of Abbeville, where she grew up. (more…)
Explosion underscores importance of laboratory safety
On Sunday, January 28, 2018, there was a significant explosion in a chemistry laboratory. Fortunately, no one was injured due to the laboratory being vacant at the moment of the explosion, but the fume hood where it occurred was severely damaged. The safety sash, which consists of four safety glass panels at the front of the fume hood, was found destroyed when a student returned to the laboratory – three of the panels were completely displaced and found lying on the floor. The transite panels that line the back of the fume hood were cracked into several pieces as well. (more…)
ScIU’s Top Hits of 2017
2017 was a good year for ScIU. We exceeded our goal of publishing one post per week, and published a total of 56 blog posts! Traffic to our website has increased by 53% per post since fall of 2016, and our list of subscribers continues to grow!
A few posts in particular received a lot of attention from our readers – here are our Top Hits of 2017! (more…)