High-quality conversations and laughter may contribute to longer life expectancy in Latinx populations in the United States, according to a new study in PLosONE by the University of Connecticut. Researchers sought to explain the Latinx health paradox — the fact that Latinx experience longer life expectancies than counterparts from other cultures despite their poorer socioeconomic and psychosocial circumstances — by exploring the impact of social networks and cultural processes. Past research has proposed the sociocultural health resilience model by way of explanation, noting that the collectivism of Latinos compared to other cultures – the fact that they often live nearer to extended family – is a factor in their good health. “Quality of conversations and conversational partners are two variables that haven’t been looked at before,” says Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, associate professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, who led the study with Adrián García-Sierra from the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. Researchers tracked the amount of time participants spent laughing as an indicator of well-being using audio recording devices to capture the participants’ day-to-day conversations. They studied 26 Latina women and 24 White-European women – all mothers – and each with an average of 32 hours of audio recordings. And, they analyzed the quality …

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The combination of a big population, good genes, and luck helps explain how a species of fish in Texas’ Houston Ship Channel was able to adapt to what would normally be lethal levels of toxins for most other species, according to a study published in the journal Science. The exceptional survivor story of the Gulf killifish was one that intrigued scientists at the University of Connecticut; University of California, Davis; Baylor University; and Indiana University. The minnow-like Gulf killifish are an important part of the food web for a number of larger fish species in coastal marsh habitats and they wanted to learn more about what other species may need to adapt to drastically changed environments. “We know that rapid adaptive evolution can happen in response to human-caused environmental change but we don’t have a great understanding of what factors facilitate it,” says Noah Reid, UConn research assistant professor in molecular and cell biology and a co-author. “Learning the underlying genetic basis of adaptation in cases like this can help us make better predictions about how and when it will occur, and better plans to conserve species and mitigate the damage we are causing to the natural environment.” Surprise guest The researchers sequenced the genomes of …

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While researching the cultural processes of inequality in community organizations, sociologist Andrea Voyer found that manners and etiquette often are noted in racial, ethnic, class and gender exclusion. In studying a parent-teacher group in a public school, for example, white and wealthy PTA parents rejected the efforts of volunteers of poor and Latinx parents who they considered “rude.” And within an elite black church, more affluent church members determined that lower-income newcomers were “not the right kind of people” for the church based on their use of language and more casual dress sitting in the pew. Such examples led Voyer to a new area of study. “I realized that expectation of manners made it acceptable to judge and exclude in ways that were reproducing social inequality,” says Voyer, a research professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and an associate senior lecturer in sociology at Stockholm University. “As a result of that research I decided to study etiquette itself.” Voyer is studying “Emily Post’s Etiquette,” the book written by the doyenne of manners first published in 1922 and currently in its nineteenth printing with the most recent update, “Emily Post’s Etiquette: Manners for Today,” published in 2017. The 19 editions include more …

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Although much of the human genome has been sequenced and assembled, scientists have hit roadblocks trying to map unassembled regions of DNA that consist mostly of repetitive sequences, including the centromere. Now, for the first time, researchers from the University of Connecticut and University of Rochester have sequenced all the centromeres in a multicellular organism. Published in the journal PLOS Biology, the study on fruit flies sheds light on a fundamental aspect of biology, and shows that genetic elements may play a larger role in centromere function than researchers previously thought. “Centromeres continue to be widely considered the ‘black hole’ of genomics,” says Barbara Mellone, associate professor of molecular and cell biology at UConn and lead author on the study. “We break through these barriers and leverage the power of single molecule long-read sequencing and chromatin fiber imaging to discover the detailed organization of the centromeres.” The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is one of the most revered examples in biology of a model organism, or species that has been extensively studied for a long time in the lab in order to better understand its biology and to apply those lessons to human health. In the context of centromere biology, Drosophila is especially powerful because it only has four …

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The University of Connecticut’s Katherine Whitaker is part of a team of astronomers who have put together the largest and most comprehensive “history book” of the universe from 16 years’ worth of observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The image yields a huge catalog of distant galaxies. “Such exquisite high-resolution measurements of the legacy field catalog of galaxies enable a wide swath of extragalactic study,” says Whitaker, the catalog lead researcher. “Often, these kinds of surveys have yielded unanticipated discoveries that have had the greatest impact on our understanding of galaxy evolution.”The deep-sky mosaic provides a wide portrait of the distant universe, containing 200,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The tiny, faint, most distant galaxies in the image are similar to the seedling villages from which today’s great galaxy star-cities grew. The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. The ambitious endeavor, called the Hubble Legacy Field, also combines observations taken by several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest view of the universe. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, …

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Four UConn undergraduates, two graduate students, and five alumni have won National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships (NSF-GRFP). The oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the NSF-GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM fields who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited institutions in the United States. In addition to a three-year annual stipend of $34,000, plus another $12,000 paid to the student’s home institution, fellows have access to a wide range of professional development opportunities over the course of their graduate careers. The Graduate Research Fellowships are highly competitive, with annual acceptance rates of about 14% from the more than 12,000 applicants. “The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is the gold standard when it comes to federally-funded fellowships for aspiring scientists,” says Vin Moscardelli, director of UConn’s Office of National Scholarships & Fellowships. “These fellowships are investments in both the science and the scientist. Reviewers are commenting not only on the quality of an applicant’s research proposal, but on the potential of the individual researcher to make a mark.” The number of winners UConn has produced has been on the rise over the years, with an average of 5.75 winners from 2012-2015, and now an average of 10.75 in the years since. The four …

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On April 11, 2019, Georgetown University’s undergraduate students voted to approve a referendum that would voluntarily charge each student a fee to be paid into a fund benefiting the descendants of enslaved people that the University sold to save itself from financial ruin in the 19th century. The move came in response to the University’s failure to act on the recommendation of its own Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to make a “meaningful financial commitment” to the descendants, says Thomas Craemer, professor of public policy in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The expert in implicit racial bias argues that reparations are not just for those who suffered. “I feel reparations have benefits for both sides – for the givers and the receivers,” he says. Craemer’s motivation to investigate implicit racial bias stems from his German heritage, within which he struggled deeply with his country’s history of Nazi racism. “As a child, I thought, how was it possible that in such a short time, people went completely berserk?” he says. “As much as I loved my grandmother, I really doubted that she didn’t know” about the Nazi concentration camps, he notes. In 2001, he and family members traveled to a concentration camp memorial …

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The Class of 2019 entered UConn in 2015 as the largest freshman cohort admitted to the University at that time. Out of nearly 35,000 applicants vying for admission, 5,200 were admitted. The Class of 2019 also set a record for the number of freshman accepted into UConn’s competitive Honors Program, with 535 enrolling in their freshman year. Although they represented one of the most ethnically diverse classes admitted to the University, with almost one-third of the class being members of minority groups, still President Susan Herbst called for yet greater efforts to embrace diversity and ‘make sure that UConn reflects the diversity of the nation.’ For the year the Class of 2019 started at UConn, the central theme for the University was “Building Our Future,” ushering in a continued effort to develop new infrastructure projects around the state in support of its mission and academic plan. Notable milestones during the Class of 2019’s time at UConn, included the opening of the University’s new 727-bed STEM residence hall, now known as the Peter J. Werth Residence Tower, and the new Engineering and Science Building, and the return of the Hartford campus to its city roots with the opening of a downtown campus in 2017. In the years since …

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Grass-eating mammals – including armadillos as big as Volkswagens – became more diverse in South America about 6 million years ago because shifts in atmospheric circulation drove changes in climate and vegetation, a team of researchers report in the April 29 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Geoscientists already knew the Earth was cooling 7 to 5.5 million years ago, a period of time known as the Late Miocene. But the changes in ocean climate during that time have been better understood than changes in the continental climate, says lead author Barbara Carrapa, professor and head of the University of Arizona Department of Geosciences. The research team included Carrapa, UConn’s Ran Feng, an assistant professor-in-residence of geosciences, and Mark Clementz of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The new research shows that about 7 to 6 million years ago, the global scale tropical atmospheric circulation – known as the Hadley Cell – intensified. Warm, wet air from the tropics rose, traveled through the upper atmosphere toward the poles, and then sunk in the subtropics. This circulation was responsible for the trade winds, tropical rain belts, subtropical deserts, and hurricanes. As a result of the intensification, the climate of South America became …

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A set of unassuming and unlabeled white double doors open into the basement of Sprague Residence Hall. Just beyond the foyer, which is stacked with folded and packaged linens, are rows of stainless steel laundry washing and drying machines, slowly tumbling and turning, making the air comfortably warm and thick with the scent of detergent and fabric softeners. But most students who make their way to this part of Sprague Hall aren’t here for the laundry service. They instead walk beyond the folding tables and the storage closets, down a twisting hallway, to a set of classrooms that are full of a completely different kind of warmth and that are unlike any others on the Storrs campus. The walls of the classrooms beneath Sprague Hall are covered with posters and photographs that testify to the activities and accomplishments of the students that meet there – participants in the Students Transitioning to Age-appropriate Routes program, a class better known as S.T.A.A.R., which represents a unique partnership between UConn and Connecticut’s Regional School District 19. S.T.A.A.R. is a transitional program for students ages 18 to 21 that is designed to help young adults living with developmental disabilities continue their learning, develop vocational and independent living …

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