Research Roundup at Montana State University (#276), Norway-bound, Coffee and the American West, Ant trails, Tough bacteria
| April 22, 2008 |  View for printing |
Norway-bound
If you want to learn more about carbon sequestration, talk to a Norwegian. They're among the world's leaders in the movement to reduce greenhouse gases by capturing and storing carbon dioxide, says Steve Holmgren, director of the Undergraduate Scholars Program at Montana State University. To learn more, three undergraduates from MSU and one from the University of Montana received funding from the National Science Foundation to travel to Norway this summer to work with researchers there. Bovard Tiberi and Whitney Treadway of Helena, Kelly Alsup of Spearfish, S.D., and Jackson ChiefElk of San Jose, Calif., will spend eight weeks at the University of Bergen and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Also going are faculty members Dave Lageson from MSU and Michael Ceballos from UM.
Coffee and the American West
Coffee has been a staple of the American West since pioneer days. It symbolized rugged individualism and a separation from the tea drinkers of Europe, according to four MSU students majoring in the media and theatre arts or English. Nick Andrews of Helena, Emma Lynn of Millingar, Ireland, Ronald Rivera-Green of Phoenixville, Pa., and Alex Thomas of Veradale, Wash., will make a short documentary called "Grounds of Change: How Coffee Transformed the American West." The students said the top 10 coffee drinking cities in America are west of the Mississippi, and Seattle is the home of coffee in North America. At last count, Bozeman had about 27 coffee houses, not counting drive-up huts. Rivera-Green's hometown had two coffee houses with a third on the way.
Ant trails
Ants remember the location of their last best meal by excreting pheromones on the trail to the food. The better the food, the stronger the pheromones. In a similar way, Tim Hahn and Shen Wan searched for the best routes in an optical network. The process is challenging when each fiber can carry hundreds of different colors of light at the same time, Hahn said. Hahn and Wan, both MSU graduate students in computer science, took a course in artificial intelligence and did a class project together. Using an ant colony as an analogy, they explained their research during the spring Student Research Celebration at MSU. Nearly 300 undergraduates and graduate students participated in the event.
Tough bacteria
Bacteria might be tougher than you think. Researchers in MSU's Imaging and Chemical Analysis Lab wanted to know much pressure it would take to penetrate the cell wall of a live bacterium, so they immobilized a bacterium and stabbed the cell wall more than 50 times with the tip of an atomic force microscope. Unlike a balloon, it didn't pop. It seemed to remain alive and intact. Muhammedin Deliorman, an MSU graduate student in physics and member of ICAL, said the researchers conducted the experiment because they want to find a way to transfer biological material into bacterium without killing the bacterium. Deliorman ‛s adviser is ICAl director Recep Avci. Both are natives of Turkey.
Evelyn Boswell, (406) 994-5135 or evelynb@montana.edu
http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwvi ... rticle=5842
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