024 - NatSci News June 2021 Transcript You're listening to NatSci News Rewind a podcast that looks back at the monthly news headlines in the world of NatSci. Let's take a look back at the news for the month of June 2021. MSU research supports lifting the weight of physics GRE in admissions The physics Graduate Record Examination (GRE) costs just over $200, is administered early Saturday morning and requires the prospective student to answer 100 rapid fire questions in just three hours. According to the physics GRE website, doing well on the test will help students stand out like a diamond in the rough among the thousands of other applications being sifted through admissions committees. But newly published research by MSU scientists concluded that rather than helping, taking the physics GRE could actually harm a student’s chances of admission. MSU statistician attains uncommon Institute of Mathematical Statistics "Annals quadfecta" status Michigan State University statistician Frederi Viens is one of a select group of 23 scholars worldwide who have achieved what has been dubbed the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Annals quadfecta. The IMS publishes four flagship "Annals" research journals, considered to be top periodicals in each of their respective subfields. The notion of the Annals quadfecta came about when a two-person team at the University of Toronto wondered which authors had accomplished the feat of publishing at least one paper in all four of these journals. How social pressure can shape evolution Michigan State University-led research is showing how social dynamics can help us understand behaviors in primates, including humans. MSU integrative biologist Elizabeth Tinsley Johnson and collaborators at the University of Michigan, Arizona State University and Stony Brook University in New York, have studied geladas in Ethiopia’s Simien Mountain National Park for 14 years to look for answers. Their findings were published earlier this month in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Grant helps MSU welcome bees and butterflies to campus MSU NatSci plant biologist Lars Brudvig and MSU landscape services manager Matthew Bailey recently landed a 3-year grant from Project Wingspan as part of a larger effort to make campus pollinator friendly, while tackling the issue of invasive species—a problem that jeopardizes biodiversity, permanently alters habitats, and can sometimes lead to the extinction of native plants and animals. As a recipient, MSU received 16 different species of Michigan native seed including black-eyed Susans, buttonbush, foxglove, purple coneflower, milkweed and blazing star wildflower to help reclaim and restore an area of campus just off of Trowbridge Road. Are zebra mussels eating or helping toxic algae? While invasive zebra mussels consume small plant-like organisms called phytoplankton, MSU researchers Stephen Hamilton and Orlando Sarnelle discovered during a long-term study that zebra mussels can actually increase Microcystis, a type of phytoplankton known as “blue-green algae”, that forms harmful floating blooms. The study, titled Cascading effects: Insights from the U.S. Long Term Ecological Research Network, is one of five projects recently highlighted in a special feature in the Ecological Society of America’s journal, Ecosphere. MSU's Beronda Montgomery named American Society of Plant Biologists Fellow MSU Foundation Professor Beronda Montgomery has been named a 2021 Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). Montgomery is being recognized for her distinguished and long-term contributions to plant biology and service to the society. Beetles, biodiversity and 'Battlestar Galactica' The original Star Trek television series took place in a future when space is the final frontier, but humanity hasn’t reached that point quite yet. As researchers like MSU entomologists Sarah Smith and Anthony Cognato are reminding us, there’s still plenty to discover right here on Earth. Working in Central and South America, the duo discovered more than three dozen species of ambrosia beetles — beetles that eat ambrosia fungus — previously unknown to science. Smith and Cognato described these new species on June 16 in the journal ZooKeys and named some after iconic sci-fi heroines. MSU's Bruno Basso lands inaugural Morgan Stanley sustainability award In an exciting collaboration between MSU's Bruno Basso and Skidmore College's Kristofer Covey, farmers in the United States will have an opportunity to cultivate a sustainable future for themselves and the planet with MySOC, a platform that measures soil carbon through app-led field methods, sophisticated remote sensing technology and biophysical modelling recently awarded a $250,000 prize from the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Solutions Collaborative. A quantum leap for molecular simulations Developing improved materials for things such as energy storage and drug discovery is of interest to researchers and society alike. Quantum mechanics (QM) is the basis for molecular and materials scientists who develop these useful, futuristic products. The challenge is that the QM calculations to describe the many properties of molecules and the materials they make up require a lot of computer power. To address this issue, a small team of postdoctoral scholars led by MSU’s Kenneth Merz, and University of California, San Diego’s Andreas Goetz developed software that takes advantage of powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs, for these complex QM calculations of molecules. MSU Beal Seed Experiment Michigan State University's 142-year-old Beal Seed Experiment keeps growing. The experiment—one the world's longest plant biology experiments—was started by MSU botanist William J. Beal in 1879 to help farmers increase crop production by eliminating weeds from their farms. The project involved filling 20 narrow-necked bottles with 50 seeds from 23 weed species and burying them in an clandestine location, with an initial plan to unearth one bottle every five years. Fast forward to spring 2021, a team of MSU scientists, including NatSci plant biologists Lars Brudvig, David Lowry, Marjorie Weber and Beal Seed Experiment team leader continued with the experiment with the unearthing of another of Beal’s bottles. Math 101/102 reimagined: New online classes a "virtual" success A champion team of three math instructors—Michael Brown, Math 102 supervisor; Rachael Lund, Math 101 supervisor, and Shiv Karunakaran, assistant professor of mathematics educationt — assembled the summer before students virtually arrived in Fall 2020 with plans to design a new online platform for Math 101/102. COVID forced their plans into action sooner than anticipated. The quantitative literacy courses rolled out to more than 1,600 students that fall semester—just in the nick of time. Cellular matchmaking: How viruses connect, infect bacterial partners Kristin Parent, J.K. Billman, Jr., M.D. Endowed Research Professor at MSU, is lead investigator on a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award (MIRA). Her pioneering research utilizes basic microbiology and cutting-edge cryo-microscopy to investigate, at the near atomic level, how viruses known as bacteriophage, or phage, use cell surface proteins to connect to, infect and reproduce inside some of the world’s deadliest gut bacteria, destroying them in the process. And that will wrap up the rewind for the month of June 2021. To read more about these stories, head on over to our website at natsci.msu.edu/news. You can also stay up to date by following us on social. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @msunatsci. Thanks for tuning in and be sure to check us out next month.