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Racial biases in neuroscience research methods: Electroencephalography (EEG) & black hair

Posted on by J Wolny

This post was written by J Wolny and Alisha Cayce. 

The lyrics “Don’t touch my hair, when it’s the feelings I wear,” sung by the widely acclaimed musician Solange, express how hair can be an extension of one’s identity for many in the Black community. However important hair is to many Black individuals, cultural sensitivity in working with Black clients and research participants is often absent from basic neuroscience research training. This blog aims to discuss how hair biases and hair discrimination impact Black individuals’ representation in neuroscience research, with a particular focus on one neuroscience method known as Electroencephalography (or EEG, for short). (more…)

Winning at Wordle with machine learning

Posted on by Lindy Howe

You may have seen tweets, received texts, and noticed social media posts. One daily word. Five letters. Six guesses.

Wordle took the world by storm at the beginning of 2022. If you aren’t familiar, Wordle challenges people to guess a five-letter word in six guesses, with a new word refreshing every single day. There are 2,315 secret words with 12,972 possible words as a guess. The game lets you know how you’re doing after each guess by color coding the letters in the word you guessed. A green letter = the letter and position are correct, yellow = correct letter but incorrect position, and gray = letter is not in that word.

Once the game grew in popularity, friendly competition began. “I got today’s word in 5 guesses!” I told my partner excitedly. “Hah, I got it in 4,” he smugly replied. (more…)

Biases of the fossil record

Posted on by Allison Nelson

Mounted statue of a Triceratops fossil at a museum. People can be seen in the background looking at a wall of fossils.
Mounted Triceratops fossil as part of an indoor exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Image credit: Allie_Caulfield (CC BY 2.0), Wikimedia Commons.

As scientists, we strive to reduce error and bias as much as possible. But as a paleontologist, I need to be aware of the biases I can’t reduce. The fossil record is inherently biased. Not everything that dies becomes a fossil. Not every fossil has been found. Not every fossil stays intact well enough to study. These biases in the fossil record come in many forms and are studied under the branch of paleontology known as taphonomy.

What becomes a fossil? Animals are more likely to fossilize if their bodies are made of hard material (such as calcium carbonate or bone) than if they’re a soft-bodied organism, such as a slug. When a slug dies it decomposes and leaves nothing behind. Therefore, nothing is left to fossilize. These animals only get preserved in particular, rare environments. One example of this are conodonts – basically aquatic slugs with teeth from the Paleozoic Era (498-298 million years ago). Paleontologists found the teeth but could not figure out what they were from–until an imprint of the animal was found, with its teeth in place. The fossils were found in what used to be a quiet lake where the mud at the bottom of the lake encased the animals and preserved impressions of their bodies. (more…)

ScIU update: We’re back!

Posted on by ScIU Editorial Team

Dear Reader,

As you may have noticed, ScIU took a period of hiatus over the summer. It was a tough decision since, without missing a single week, ScIU has published a weekly blog post about science and the humans involved in scientific endeavors since the blog’s formation in 2016. At this point, ScIU has published more than 300 posts by IU graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and undergraduate students from all different fields, from geology to physics, from psychology to chemistry, from ecology to linguistics. In its lifetime, ScIU has received more than 300,000 unique pageviews from tens of thousands of users. The site has received at least one visitor from almost every country in the world.  Many of our alumni have gone on to successful careers in science communication, industry, and academia. (more…)

30 years of Hubble: Images and discoveries that shaped astronomy

Posted on by ScIU Editorial Team

To celebrate International Astronomy Day (May 7), we are highlighting this post from ScIU’s archives! It was originally published by Jennifer Sieben in April 2020 and has been lightly edited to reflect current events.

April 24th, 2020 was the 30th anniversary of the launch of perhaps the most famous telescope: the Hubble Space Telescope. Orbiting the earth, this telescope has changed the way astronomers and the public alike view the universe. With over 1.4 million observations, providing data for more than 16,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers, Hubble has exceeded expectations.

Stunning Images

If you have ever seen an image of a spiral galaxy as a desktop background, textbook cover, or in the background of an inspirational quote, the chances are high that it was taken by Hubble. Images like these highlight the spectacular beauty of our universe and are often a great tool to encourage interest in science. Hubble images demonstrate that science can be more than a mixture of numbers and buggy code; it can also be spiral galaxies that show where new stars are being formed and remind us that the mystery of galaxy formation is still unsolved. New data received from Hubble constantly challenges our preconceived notions about the universe. 

A bright spiral galaxy with two prominent arms of red with a blue glow of stars. The center is bright white.
A Hubble image of the Whirlpool Galaxy, featuring pink star-forming regions and brilliant blue strands of star clusters. Image taken in 2011. Image credit: NASA/ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

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Grey wolves can be black? Recent trail camera footage shows a pack of black wolves in Minnesota

Posted on by Allison Nelson

Recently, a trail camera in northern Minnesota caught video of a pack of all-black wolves. The video has been viewed more than 950,000 times since it was uploaded in late December 2021. A greyish-brown wolf crosses the meadow in the shot, followed by three all-black wolves. People are fascinated. So, what affects animal coloration? And why are these wolves black?

First, although these wolves are black, they are still Canis lupus (commonly called the grey wolf). Naturally, wolves are red, brown, white, grey, black, and shades in between. These are the same colors we see available in nature in human hairs: black, brown, blonde, red, and grey/white. Other body coverings, such as scales and feathers, can be different colors due to the pigments available. Animals use color for camouflage, thermoregulation, and mating selection.

Three wolves in a field. On the left is a black colored wolf standing and facing left. On the right, a grey-red-brown colored wolf sits, possibly being groomed by a whitw colored wolf who is standing.
The range of wolf colors in Yellowstone National Park includes black, greyish-red-brown, and white. Image credit: NPS/Jim Peaco.

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Familial DNA as a method of identifying serial killers

Posted on by ScIU Editorial Team

To celebrate National DNA Day (April 25), we are highlighting this post from ScIU’s archives! It was originally published by Brittany Hood in January 2019.

Trigger warning: This post contains details of specific crimes that are related to sexual assault and murder.

In 1992, an 84-year-old grandmother was brutally assaulted and killed in California. For 25 years, the mystery of her death went unsolved — and her killer unapprehended — due to the lack of physical evidence to tie him to the crime. Twenty-five years later, police paid a visit to a pizza party, where they found sufficient evidence to arrest her murderer.  

Slice of pizza on a white plate next to a drink and condiments.

 

At first glance, the murder and the pizza party seem unrelated. However, there is a link: familial DNA. Familial DNA testing has traditionally been used for a multitude of reasons, such as to identify potential genetic predispositions and to structure family trees. However, with advancements in technology, law enforcement agencies are now utilizing familial DNA testing to identify serial killers. San Diego police found a familial DNA connection, suggesting that a biological brother was responsible for the 1992 rape and murder of 84-year-old Angela Kleinsorge. In order to confirm that the DNA belonged to the suspect, police went undercover to a birthday party and collected Lonnie Franklin’s leftover pizza crust and utensils. The DNA was a match, and Franklin was arrested a mere two hours later. He was eventually tied to ten murders and has since been suspected of more. He is now known as the “Grim Sleeper.” (more…)

Deciphering geographers’ lingo

Posted on by Dan Myers

Every academic discipline has its own special words and phrases. However, it is hard to match geography in terms of words that are just curious. Did you know that “space” and “place” mean very different things? That the “Annals” is the hallmark of a geographer’s career? And the “First Law of Geography” is extremely important, but does not always hold true? To decipher the meanings of these words and phrases, we first must come to terms with the most ambiguous word of them all: “geographer.”

An embellished map of the world from 1689, including separate frames for the western hemisphere, eastern hemisphere, and north and south poles.
Geographers do a lot more than work with maps, and they have their own lingo. Image credit: Gerard van Schagen.

“Geographer”

Many people assume that a geographer is either: a) someone who makes maps, or b) someone who studies the Earth. However, someone who makes maps is a cartographer, and someone who studies the Earth is a geologist. In reality, a geographer can study pretty much anything. The best definition of a geographer I have heard was from my Introduction to Geography professor: “A geographer is what a geographer does, and a geographer does what they want.” Geographers are typically classified into two branches of study, “human” and “physical,” although there can also be fascinating overlap between these branches.

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The power of quantum computing: Parallelism

Posted on by ScIU Editorial Team

To celebrate World Quantum Day (April 14), we are highlighting this post from ScIU’s archives! It was originally published by AJ Rasmusson in July 2019.

Tech companies are going big in a microscopic way, pouring millions of dollars into a new form of computing: quantum computing. Quantum computers will revolutionize drug research, material discovery, and artificial intelligence by solving complex problems in a new way. To understand this, let’s review how normal computers solve problems and compare this to how a quantum computer would do it.

The picture shows three serious problems quantum computing could solve: a cure for cancer, boosting food production, and breaking computer encryption codes. They are some of the overly optimistic outcomes of quantum computers.
The hope of what quantum computers can do. Although many of these goals are far from being reached, scientists are cautiously optimistic that a quantum computer of the future will accomplish them. Image credit: EPiQC zine on quantum computing.

Today’s computers use billions upon billions of 0’s and 1’s, called bits, to represent information like numbers, words, images, etc. To watch a movie or simulate life-saving chemical reactions in medicine, a processor in the computer takes a group of bits and modifies them according to programmed instructions. For example, to watch Avengers: Infinity War, your computer processes more than 16 billion bits. By repeating this process very quickly, your computer can turn a file of 0’s and 1’s into moving images on your display or store answers to complex math equations in a new file.

Quantum computers take a different approach to information processing. Instead of solving a problem one outcome at a time, a quantum computer computes every possible outcome simultaneously. To understand the power of that statement (and what it even means), let’s consider an example. (more…)

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