On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Veona Cutinho. Veona works in the Cellular Reprogramming Laboratory at MSU led by Dr. Jose Cibelli. She works with zebrafish embryos and manipulates them so they can be ideal donors for cloning. These tiny embryos are perfect for studying cloning because their development is quick, easy to see, and happens outside the body! While cloning was once a big deal, it's kind of old-fashioned now because it's tough to get it just right. Veona and team at the Cellular Reprogramming Lab  are trying to figure out what the ..read more

Yunting Gu is a PhD candidate in linguistics from Michigan State University. Her research in speech production suggests a basis for several universals regarding the sound pattern of languages. Despite the differences in languages, some sound patterns are common to most languages of the world. For example, cross-linguistically, syllables starting with pl are more frequently observed than syllables starting with pt, which is more frequent than syllables starting with lp. Also, syllables that have a consonant followed by a vowel (such as so) are more common across different languages than syllabl ..read more

On this week's episode of The Sci-Files, your hosts Mari and Dimitri interview Kiyotaka Suga, a PhD candidate in Second Language Studies. One of the engaging questions for second language (L2) teachers is how to introduce grammar instruction to help adult L2 learners develop their well-balanced communicative abilities. Most L2 teachers may believe intuitively that engaging in output (speaking and writing) practice in L2 classrooms is crucial for adult L2 learners to develop their productive skills. Despite such common beliefs about output practice, the roles of output in L2 grammar acquisition ..read more

Bryan Stanley is a PhD student in the Physics Department. He does Physics Education Research (PER), where he primarily studies informal physics programs. Informal physics programs create physics learning spaces outside of the traditional classroom settings. Examples of these types of programs include, but are not limited to, summer camps, planetarium shows, public lectures, student groups, science festivals, and open houses. The events that these programs host are sometimes called public engagement or outreach. These types of programs can impact and support youth and adult audiences and univer ..read more

When you get a scrape or cut, you might reach for a tube of Neosporin, but have you ever wondered what exactly this antimicrobial ointment does to bacteria, or how bacteria might avoid being killed? Bacteria possess a dizzying variety of specialized protein machinery that help them resist our medicines, complicating treatment of infection. Natasha, a graduate student in the department of microbiology and molecular genetics, studies these antibiotic resistance machines with the help of cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that uses high-powered microscopes and frozen samples to capture snapsho ..read more

Blood transfusions can be life-saving procedures for patients in need. However, they can also impart much more devastating complications, leading to poorer outcomes than prior to transfusion, such as infection, inflammation, and even death. This is in part due to the red blood cell “storage lesion”, which refers to the irreversible metabolic and physiological damages that occur to red blood cells (RBCs) during their storage period, such as membrane damage, protein/lipid oxidation, glycation, cell lysis, and many other detrimental changes vital to proper RBC function. Logan Soule is a 5th year ..read more

Period poverty is an important, yet often ignored, public health crisis. The social shame and steep cost of menstrual products often push low-income people to adopt unhygienic practices during menstruation, negatively impacting their health, education, and dignity.   Specifically, period poverty significantly impacts young menstruators in universities. The lack of access to menstrual hygiene products forces many students to resort to rags, paper towels, toilet paper, and other substitutes, increasing the risk of several reproductive health issues. According to a study conducted by Days fo ..read more

Alyssa studies the reproductive biology of African electric fish, called mormyrids, with a focus on their sperm and eggs. These freshwater fishes are found throughout lakes and river throughout the African continent and are used by research laboratories across the globe to study questions in evolution, neuroscience, behavior, and other biological disciplines. Besides their amazing ability to produce electricity, these fishes are also unique in that their sperm cells lack tails. Almost all animal sperm cells have a tail that allows them to swim to eggs to achieve fertilization, but the sperm of ..read more

Ben is a graduate student in the Departments of Integrative Biology and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at Michigan State University. His research interests include understanding how species adapt to changing environments, especially thermal stress and conservation of coldwater fishes. Ben uses genomic tools to improve our understanding of species conservation by examining adaptive potential and genetic health in wild trout populations. If you’re interested in discussing your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Mari and Dimitri at thescifileswdbm@gmail.com.  C ..read more

On the first episode with the new hosts of The Sci-Files, Mari Dowling and Dimitri Joseph interview Megan McGrath.  Interacting with the world relies on our ability to take in information and stimuli from our environment and integrate it into a cohesive explanation of what it happening around us. But the world is full of constant, unending stimuli...so how do we know what to pay attention to? If we were consciously aware of everything that was happening in the world, we would never be able to function, so our brains have a built in "gain function", aka the thalamus. This brain structure a ..read more