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Welcome to the NatSci news page! Check back often to learn about the latest innovations, discoveries and accomplishments of our faculty, staff, students and alumni.
March 10, 2021
On December 6, 2016, a high-energy particle was hurtling through space at nearly the speed of light and happened to smash into an electron deep inside the South Pole’s glacial ice. The collision created a new particle, known as the W– boson. This enabled IceCube to make the first ever detection of a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow. The international IceCube Collaboration, including MSU scientists Claudio Kopper and Nathan Whitehorn, published this result online on March 11 in the journal Nature.
March 9, 2021
A warming climate may not increase water demand for Midwest crops that may instead be adapted through soil management to changing air temperatures and moisture, said MSU scientists helping farmers manage the challenge. The research team, led by ecosystems scientist Bruno Basso, found that the Midwest is in a unique location that typically receives ample rainfall and has deep soil, ideal for farming. Their results were published March 5 in the journal Nature Communications.
February 25, 2021
The National Science Foundation has awarded Michigan State University researcher Polly Hsu a $1.2 million grant to probe plant genetics at a new level to better understand how crops cope with drought. This work could help farmers and scientists better protect plants as water scarcity is projected to affect more and more people over the next century.
February 12, 2021
During his ground-breaking E. coli Long-Term Evolution Project, MSU experimental evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski has witnessed the beginning and end of more than one lifetime—73,000 bacterial lifetimes and counting, to be exact. Now, the Society for the Study of Evolution is honoring Lenski’s extraordinary life to date with the prestigious 2021 SSE Evolution Lifetime Achievement Award.
February 8, 2021
Climate change is bleaching and killing corals, but researchers from MSU and the University of Hawaii are investigating how some can stand up to a warming world. According to research published Feb. 8 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the scientists discovered biochemical clues following an extreme high temperature event in Hawaii's Kenneohe Bay that could help reefs better weather warming waters in the future.
February 5, 2021
According to a paper recently published in BioScience by MSU entomologist Anthony Cognato and master's student Erica Fischer, collaboration between amateur butterfly collectors and entomology researchers has never been so critical to ensuring that critically important large-scale contemporary and future ecological, conservation, and evolutionary hypotheses concerning insects can be tested.
February 1, 2021
MSU plant biologist David Lowry is part of a study that examines the use of switchgrass in fighting climate change to improve crop growth. As reported in a recent issue of Nature, the team has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome, and is exploring improvements to switchgrass through more targeted genome editing and customization of the crop for additional end products.
January 29, 2021
A new four-year, $13 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is helping the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at MSU harvest unused isotopes for a variety of research fields, including medicine, materials science and environmental studies.
January 26, 2021
Researchers in MSU's College of Natural Science have completed the largest census of freshwater insects ever undertaken in the United States, the first of its kind. The database, which includes 2.05 million occurrence records for 932 genera of major freshwater insect orders at more than 51,000 streams and rivers, was presented in a paper recently published in the journal Global Ecology & Biogeography.
January 15, 2021
Contaminant runoff from Michigan septic systems, agriculture and industry has caused enough environmental damage in the Saginaw Bay watershed for it to be designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an area of concern for the past 30 years. To address this issue, MSU geomicrobiologist Matt Schrenk is leading a 2-year Michigan Sea Grant project that will combine high resolution microbiology and geochemical studies to pinpoint the toxic leaks—a big step toward successful remediation efforts by state and local agencies.
