News

MSU researcher Dalton Hardisty uses ocean sediment to dive deep into ancient Earth’s coupled evolution of life and ocean chemistry. He’s currently part of an international research collaboration that recently published work in the prestigious journal Nature, sharing a new approach for studying important chemical and biochemical processes in the Earth’s prehistoric past.

Earthquakes are caused by the movement of the tectonic plates that make up Earth’s crust. Between 2020 and 2021, the Pacific plate and the North American plate off the coast of Alaska slipped along the Alaska-Aleutian fault, producing a series of earthquakes, including the Chignik, Alaska, earthquake on July 29, 2021, which registered an 8.2 in magnitude. MSU’s Jeffrey Freymueller is researching this earthquake to learn more about exactly where that slip occurred (and how much) to better understand how faults work and the risk of future earthquakes and tsunamis.

Yongsig Kim, a senior research associate in the Michigan State Universit-Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, is leading MSU’s $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems program in the National Institute of Food and Agriculture explore what controlled enviornment agriculture will look like in a low-carbon world and new vegetation that leaves a low-carbon footprint. 

Shannon Schmoll, science education and astronomy expert and director of the Abrams Planetarium at MSU, offers insight to the upcoming Lyrid meteor shower expected between April 16 and 25 in this Ask the Expert column.

The piezoelectric effect was first discovered in 1880 and is used in applications ranging from spark sources for stoves and gas furnaces to accelerometers in mobile phones for orientation and in automobiles to deploy airbags. While this effect has been known for a long time in solid materials, Gary Blanchard, a professor in the Department of Chemistry in MSU’s College of Natural Science and his graduate student, Md. Iqbal Hossain, were able to see the piezoelectric effect in a liquid for the first time — a finding that opens possibilities for new applications.

NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies detected an asteroid that will pass Earth by 108,758 miles this weekend, which is closer than the moon’s distance from Earth 238,855 miles away. Seth Jacobson, a planetary scientist in Michigan State University’s College of Natural Science, is a member of NASA and MSU’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission which is the world’s first planetary defense space mission and tested how to redirect asteroids that could hit Earth.