Experimental lines of field corn developed by a team of Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and university scientists will usher in new commercial hybrids offering high-methionine grain. The advance, reported in a recent issue of Crop Science, will be especially welcome news for organic poultry producers whose birds require dietary formulations of the amino acid to ensure optimal growth, health and production of meat and eggs.

ARS plant geneticist Paul Scott co-authored the Crop Science paper describing the advance together with other researchers including Shelley Kinney, Thomas Lübberstedt and Ursula Frei (all of Iowa State University in Ames). Project was conducted with support from USDA NIFA.

A high school student doing research at Coastal Carolina University has discovered a microorganism with antibiotic properties against E. coli bacteria. Writes the lab PI, Dr. Paul Richardson, “We found the organism last week, but this test proves it wasn’t chemical in nature. Now we have to isolate and identify the microorganism. This discovery was made possible through the South Carolina INBRE program.”

Learn More »

Use of low-dose atropine eyedrops was no better than placebo at slowing myopia (nearsightedness) progression and elongation of the eye among children treated for two years, according to a randomized controlled trial conducted by the Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group and funded by the NIH National Eye Institute. Results were published in JAMA Ophthalmology.

“It's possible that a different concentration of atropine is needed for US children to experience a benefit,” noted the study’s lead co-author, Katherine K. Weise, University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Clinical researchers could evaluate new pharmaceuticals and special wavelengths of light in combination with optical strategies, like special glasses or contact lenses, to see what works in reducing the progression of myopia.”

Kentucky NSF EPSCoR is proud to partner with KY FIRST® Robotics to help fund and support instructional curriculum for their First Tech Challenge program, for grades 7-12. KY FIRST Robotics is a “progression of robotics competitions for kids, beginning with the youngest innovators and going through high school… FIRST encourages it participants to think outside the box.”

16 middle school science teachers will visit the University of Kansas Field Station to explore resources and gain new ideas to take into their classrooms. The teachers serve in school districts representing a diversity of students, both urban and rural. The Summer Institute is part of an NSF EPSCoR project funded through a $20 million grant announced in 2017. The NSF project, “Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas (MAPS),” RII Track-1 Award, is a collaboration among five Kansas universities. Matching support comes from the state of Kansas through the Kansas Board of Regents.

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.