Research Highlights

Flood frequency analysis is a technique used to estimate flood risk, providing statistics that are critical to infrastructure design, dam safety analysis and flood mapping in flood-prone areas. But the method used to calculate these flood frequencies is due for an update, according to a new study by scientists at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), University of Wisconsin-Madison and Colorado State University. In NSF-supported research published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by Guo Yu of DRI examined the most common drivers of historic floods in the Western US and investigated the impact of different flood types on the resulting flood frequencies.

In May 2022, a team led by scientists from Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, departed for Greenland, where they were joined by ice drilling, Arctic logistics, and mountaineering experts. Together, the team planned to collect a 440-meter-long ice core that will represent 4,000 years of Earth and human history. For much of their time on the Greenland ice sheet, the team did not have access to the internet or phone service — but they were able to send short text messages back to DRI from a Garmin inReach two-way satellite communicator.

NIH-funded research led by the University of Alabama at Birmingham has used nuclear RNA sequencing of cells in pig hearts to understand why surgery to remove the left ventricle apex of the heart from newborn pigs was able to help them more easily recover from heart attacks weeks later. Pigs, like other mammals, do not naturally regrow heart muscle tissue after a heart attack, which makes cell sequencing an important step toward understanding how to help human hearts recover from heart attacks and lower the risk of future ones.

This study, led by Jianyi “Jay” Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, is published as a Circulation research letter. Support for this research came from National Institutes of Health grants.

Fifth-grader Emory Carter and University of Alabama at Birmingham optometrist Katherine Weise are helping end the systemic exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities from clinical studies. Emory, the son of UAB medical school professor Hernando Carter, enthusiastically signed up to join Weise's clinical trial for a myopia treatment, with the elder Carter turning Emory’s nightly eye drops into a chance to tell him about “the impact he was making" by taking part in the research, which will "help others who look like us.”

UAB Eye Care is one of the 14 sites in the US funded by the NIH devoted to studying myopia and has the only federal funding to conduct pediatric research to study the effects of low-dose atropine to treat nearsightedness. The study is still ongoing and will wrap up in the fall of 2022.

Snakes have a unique immune strategy that has caught the attention of Arkansas State University Assistant Professor of Physiology Lori Neuman-Lee, who was awarded a $40,000 grant from the Arkansas INBRE to study these creatures and their immunities. “There are two types of immune systems, adaptive and innate,” Neuman-Lee said, noting that reptilian cells are much heavier allowing snakes and other reptiles to use their innate immune system almost exclusively. This allows the snakes to fight off infections rapidly.

INSPIRES, an NSF EPSCoR RII Track-2 grant that focuses on gathering, analyzing, and utilizing data collected from across the Northern Forest Region, has partnered with the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education (RiSE Center), an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Maine. The RiSE Center provides support for twenty-two faculty members conducting educational research within their different STEM disciplines (e.g., chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering) through various programs and projects. INSPIRES and RiSE have provided a rare opportunity — especially in a science-based research project—for middle and high school teachers from across Maine and Vermont to act as researchers.

Recently, Alaska Native News highlighted Alaska EPSCoR Fire & Ice researchers Amanda Kelley and Jamie Currie and their efforts to monitor ocean acidification in Kachemak Bay. University of Alaska-Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences professor Kelley and graduate student Currie are collecting data from Kachemak Bay to gain more insight into how pH conditions are changing in Alaska’s nearshore waters.

Researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville created an artificial intelligence program that watches chemical reactions in cells on a mass scale to help biophysicists understand how the reactions happen, knowledge that will speed up the development and improve the quality of new drugs. Kannan Grant, director of UAH's commercialization office, said the office will help the researchers find a path to develop their patented technology within the next six months.

The technology utilizes complex analytics programs to rapidly observe vast quantities of complex interactions between chemicals within living cells. The application of sheer computational power to these interactions enable biophysicists to more quickly and efficiently discern the laws governing those interactions, resulting in faster, more precise, and even less expensive development of pharmaceuticals.

At the center of our very own Milky Way galaxy, scientists long suspected that there was a supermassive black hole, and they named this black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced "sadge-ay-star"). Thanks in part to US National Science Foundation support, their years of rigorous research confirmed their suspicions. On May 12, 2022, scientists released the first direct visual evidence of Sgr A*.

Because it's located at the center of the Milky Way, understanding how Sgr A* functions is fundamental to the larger goal of understanding how our galaxy formed and continues to evolve.

Alaska EPSCoR Fire and Ice is kicking off another summer of fieldwork. Here are (l to r) student Emily Reynolds, faculty Jessica Glass, student Karen Grosskreutz, student Lindsey Stadler, student Maddi McArthur, and faculty Brenda Konar in Kachemak Bay. Photo by Mike Geagel.