How genealogy cracked the case Beiyu (Pam) Lin, Biology, 2021 Source: Shutterstock On the first day of April in 1988, the midwestern town of Fort Wayne, Indiana was put into a stupor. 8-year-old April Tinsley had vanished into thin air while on a short walk from a friend’s house to her own. She had been on […]
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Utter chaos: Tracking the dispersion of airborne pollutants By Annabelle Mathers, Civil Engineering, 2022 Source: Pixabay Many processes in the natural and humanistic worlds are extraordinarily complex and seemingly random. However, in systems defined by Chaos Theory, this apparent randomness is actually not random at all, but governed by hidden patterns. Computer algorithms, biological responses,
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Little sod house on the prairie By Lillie Hoffart, Environmental Science, 2022 Source: Shutterstock With the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, the Plains region, or “Great American Desert,” was parceled out in plots. After paying a fee, farming, and living on the land for five years, the homesteader became the land’s owner. This was
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The Evolutionary Roots of Anxiety By Rachel Griep, Biology and Psychology, 2022 Source: Shutterstock Often characterized by rapid breathing and a pounding heart, anxiety is a familiar feeling that everyone has experienced at one point in life or another. Anxiety disorders are currently the most prevalent mental illness in the United States. According to the Anxiety
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Tripping our way into consciousness By Clara Bils, Behavioral Neuroscience, 2023 Source: Shutterstock At some point between 2,000 and 2 million years ago, Homo sapiens diverged from their closest relatives as our neocortex nearly doubled in size. Recent research has discovered that the ARHGAP11B gene may have played a role in this expansion; the gene
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Booting up: The curious origin stories in the language of computing By William Bonaventura, Applied Physics, 2021 Source: Pixabay The field of computer science is riddled with technical jargon. Just think of common movie scenes in which a coder spews a mouthful of incomprehensible phrases, leaving the other characters completely lost. Although much of the
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Can’t see the forest for the tree? Largest quaking aspen forest is one cloned tree By Lauren MacDonald, Environmental Science & Chemistry, 2022 Photo Credit: Eric Alvarez Approximately 80,000 years ago, a tiny seed belonging to Populus tremuloides took root in Central Utah in what is now Fishlake National Forest. That seed is now the world’s heaviest
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Paleobotanists: The Heroes of Climate Change Science By Paula Hornstein, Biochemistry 2020 Source: Shutterstock “Love to have the opinion of a paleobotanist,” says John Hammond, the fictional founder of Jurassic Park, to Dr. Ellie Sattler in the 1993 film as he invited her to preview his dinosaur park. Little did he know how relevant that statement
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Break a mirror? Psychology says not to worry By Maya Krause, Environmental Science, 2022 Source: Shutterstock Any Boston Red Sox fan will tell you about the superstition that led the baseball team to fail to win the World Series championship for 86 years. According to “the Curse of the Bambino,” the action of the Red Sox
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