Research Highlights

Can avocado peels help curb a plastic waste problem? According to a study conducted by Srinivas Janaswamy, an associate professor in South Dakota State University's Department of Dairy and Food Science, and Shafaet Ahmed, a graduate research assistant working under Janaswamy's tutelage, the fibers of avocado peels could possibly be used to make biodegradable films — something that could ultimately replace plastic as a packaging material. Funding for this project was provided by the USDA NIFA. This study was published in Industrial Crops and Products.

Vermont NSF EPSCoR and the Vermont 4-H program presented Science Fun Day, a two-hour-long set of activities for elementary students of grades 3-5. Event focused on hands-on STEM activities that helped students apply scientific learning to many different projects.

You can't see or feel it, but everything around you — including your own body — is slowly shrinking and expanding. It's the weird, spacetime-warping effect of gravitational waves passing through our galaxy, according to a new study by a team of researchers with the NSF’s NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center. The findings published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters are from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a collaborative team of researchers from more than 50 institutions in the US and abroad.

“These are by far the most powerful gravitational waves known to exist,” said West Virginia University astrophysicist Maura McLaughlin, co-director of the NANOgrav Physics Frontiers Center. “Detecting such gargantuan gravitational waves requires a similarly massive detector, and patience.”

Using 15 years of astronomical data recorded by radio telescopes at NSF-supported observatories — including Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico, and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico— the NANOGrav team created a "detector" of 67 pulsars distributed all across the sky and compared the ticking rate of pairs of those pulsars. Through a sophisticated data analysis, they deduced the presence of the gravitational wave background causing the distortion of space, and thus explained the apparent timing changes of the pulsars.

It’s been estimated that every 18 minutes in the United States, a newborn baby starts life with painful withdrawals from exposure to opioids in the womb. It’s called neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome (NOWS), and it makes for a challenging start in life. These infants may show an array of withdrawal symptoms, including tremors, extreme irritability, and problems eating and sleeping.

Many of these infants experience long, difficult hospital stays to help them manage their withdrawal symptoms. But because hospital staff have no established evidence-based treatment standards to rely on, there is substantial variation in NOWS treatment around the country. There also are many open questions about the safest and most-effective way to support these babies and their families.

But answers are coming. The New England Journal of Medicine just published clinical trial results that evaluated care for infants with NOWS and which offer some much needed—and rather encouraging—data for families and practitioners [1]. The data are from the Eating, Sleeping, Consoling for Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal (ESC-NOW) trial, led by Leslie W. Young, The University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, Burlington, and her colleagues Lori Devlin and Stephanie Merhar.

The ESC-NOW study is supported through the Advancing Clinical Trials in Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal (ACT NOW) Collaborative. ACT NOW is an essential part of the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative, an aggressive effort to speed scientific solutions to stem the national opioid public health crisis and improve lives.

Bacteria are literally everywhere — in oceans, in soils, in extreme environments like hot springs and even alongside and inside other organisms, including humans. They're nearly invisible, yet they play a big role in almost every facet of life.

Despite their abundance, surprisingly little is known about many microorganisms that have existed for billions of years.

This includes an entire lineage of nano-sized bacteria dubbed Omnitrophota. These bacteria, first discovered based on short fragments of DNA just 25 years ago, are common in many environments around the world but have been poorly understood. Until now.

An NSF-supported research team has produced the first large-scale analysis of more than 400 newly sequenced and existing Omnitrophota genomes, uncovering new details about their biology and behavior. The team's findings are reported in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Murray State University (MSU) professors Dr. Aleck Leedy and Dr. Kevin Miller recently received funding from Kentucky NSF EPSCoR for the establishment of a Fuel Cell Laboratory on the MSU campus. The laboratory will support research and training of undergraduate engineering physics and chemistry students. Research studies will focus on the performance and durability of PEM (proton-exchange membrane) fuel cells which will employ novel, ion-containing polymeric membranes synthesized at Murray State.

Nearly 240 academic and aspiring scientists from across the North Dakota University System assembled in Fargo for the 2023 ND EPSCoR Annual State Conference on March 29. The conference revealed the great strides is making towards fulfilling its mission to broaden and diversify the state’s STEM workforce pathways, support and grow statewide research efforts, and inform ND stakeholders.

Delaware INBRE recently hosted their Spring 2023 External Advisory Committee Meeting. They heard updates and news from their partner and affiliate institutions. Their EAC members toured the University of Delaware cores and facilities. They also heard project updates from all of their Pilot Project Investigators and students during a poster reception.

One of Kansas NSF EPSCoR’s microbiome project leaders, Jim Bever, is one of seven scientists across the US who has been named a fellow of the Ecological Society of America. Fellows are members who have made outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA

A new NSF-funded explores the association between the use of multiple funding sources and how that affects future educational pursuits. “Pursuing multiple funding sources used to imply ambition,” said ChangHwan Kim, professor of sociology at the University of Kansas. “Now it implies desperation.”