Research Highlights

A new theory suggests that light can escape vacuums. Researchers from Dartmouth College funded by the NSF have developed a theoretical method to produce light from an electromagnetic vacuum, something once thought unobservable. The research sheds light on the nature of black holes and their massive gravitational pull.

The team published its findings in Communications Physics. The scientists propose that using photon detectors in an electromagnetic vacuum and enhancing the output to increase visibility demonstrates that photons can escape a vacuum.

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Worms don’t wiggle when they have Alzheimer’s disease. Yet something helped worms with the disease hold onto their wiggle in Dr. Jessica Tanis’s lab at the University of Delaware.

In solving the mystery, Tanis and her team have yielded new clues into the potential impact of diet on Alzheimer’s, the dreaded degenerative brain disease afflicting more than 6 million Americans.

“As humans, we have immense genetic diversity and such complex diets that it makes it really hard to decipher how one dietary factor is affecting the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s,” Tanis said. “That’s where the worms are amazing. The worms we use all have exactly the same genetic background, they react to amyloid beta like humans do, and we can exactly control what they eat, so we can really get down to the molecular mechanisms at work.”

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Alaska EPSCoR Boreal Fires researchers Randi Jandt and Alison York were recently published in Scientific American in an article entitled, “Wildfire is Transforming Alaska and Amplifying Climate Change.”

Wildfires across the high north are increasing in frequency and size. They are also transforming landscapes and ecosystems. In addition to being a fuel, duff is a remarkable insulator of underlying frozen ground—so much so that it has been keeping much of subsurface Alaska frozen since the Pleistocene epoch. Each half-inch of thickness keeps the underlying permafrost—ground that remains below freezing for two or more years—about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degree Celsius) cooler. But if enough duff burns off, the underlying permafrost thaws, turning parts of Alaska into softening, slumping ground. Trees rooted in this thawing ground can tilt at all angles, like haphazard Leaning Towers of Pisa.

Extensive wildfire is accelerating climate change, too. Large fires throw a stunning amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most of it comes from the duff, not the trees. The thick duff layers across high latitudes store 30 to 40 percent of all the soil carbon on Earth. In 2015 severe wildfires in interior Alaska burned 5.1 million acres, releasing about nine million metric tons of carbon from standing vegetation—and 154 million tons from the duff, according to Christopher Potter of NASA's Earth Sciences Division. (That calculation includes carbon lost to decomposition and erosion for two subsequent years.) The total amount of CO₂ is equal to that emitted by all of California's cars and trucks in 2017. As more ground thaws, ice in the lower layers of duff melts and drains away, drying the duff farther down, making it more ready to burn deeply. This feedback loop most likely will expand the acres burned, aggravate health for millions of people and make the climate change faster than ever. Feedbacks may even convert the entire region from one that absorbs more carbon than it emits to one that emits more carbon than it absorbs.

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Researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center have developed a modular vaccine system that can be used to generate vaccines against known and emerging viral pathogens. The system can rapidly generate vaccine candidates and allows for the incorporation of multiple peptide-based antigens from a virus of interest or from multiple viruses. Since multiple antigens can be combined in one vaccine, it can help increase the efficacy of vaccines against emerging viral diseases. More

Oklahoma EPSCoR researchers study rare October 2020 ice storm that caused widespread damage in OK. Dr. Muralee Muraleetharan from the University of Oklahoma’s School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science led a team of research scientists, postdoc, and students to quantitatively assess and recommend measures to enhance the ice storm resilience of power distribution systems. More

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette played a key role in helping to develop Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine and has used its research to help the city of New Orleans create a COVID-19 action plan to vaccinate remote residents and to reduce the virus' spread. "We do research for a reason. For us, there is nothing more impactful, meaningful or urgent," said Ramesh Kolluru, vice president of research, innovation and economic development. More

A research team at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences has identified a potential cause of long-lasting symptoms experienced by COVID-19 patients, often referred to as “long-haulers.” At the heart of the team’s findings is an antibody that shows up weeks after an initial infection and attacks and disrupts a key regulator of the immune system. The Little Rock scientists published their findings this month in the journal, The Public Library of Science ONE (PLOS ONE). More

NASA PR Space Grant Consortium announces a new program for students entitled, “Here to Observe”. Consortium Director, Dr. Gerardo Morell, explained that the program will offer university students the opportunity to interact with a NASA scientist or engineer who will be their mentor, learn how NASA planetary missions are conceptualized and developed, participate in NASA Science and professional development seminars, and to be part of the network of NASA planetary missions members, as well as additional professional and personal development experiences.

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A group of North Dakota State University faculty and libraries staff received financial support from the ND EPSCoR State Office STEM grants program to purchase two portable 3D laser scanners. These are now available for checkout at the NDSU Digital Fabrication Lab to all faculty, staff, and students. To learn more about this service, please visit the NDSU Libraries Data Visualization Lab website.

Nebraska EPSCoR researcher Xia Hong is among fifteen University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty members to have been selected to participate in the second cohort of the Office of Research and Economic Development’s Research Leaders Program.

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