This year, the University of Connecticut launched a new environmental literacy general educational requirement that ensures students graduate having taken at least one three-credit course anchored to environmental topics. A long-sought goal for a passionate group of students and faculty members, the environmental literacy component bolsters the university’s position as a leading institution of higher learning committed to sustainability and environmentalism. Initial conversations about an environmental literacy requirement began about 15 years ago, says David Wagner, ecology and evolutionary biology professor. The requirement was recently proposed and approved by the University Senate in 2018. Wagner, Carol Atkinson-Palombo, a professor of geography, and John Clausen, a recently retired professor of natural resources and the environment, were among a group of more than a dozen faculty members who worked in concert with students to achieve the effort. The energy and voices of the students was “key,” says Atkinson-Palombo. The framework between faculty support and student endeavors, including petitions, letters, speeches on the floor of the University Senate, and articles in the Daily Campus, demonstrated the students’ desire for instituting the new general education requirement. “I work quite closely with students, and the environment is one of the issues they are most concerned about,” says Atkinson-Palombo. “They see UConn as …

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When she wrote her third book, “Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900,” historian Altina Waller thought the true story of the impact of modernization and industrialization on two families along the border of Kentucky and West Virginia would make a good film. While movies, television, musicians, and authors have long used family feuds as storylines for entertainment, the real backstory of the most famous family conflict in American history now will be told in a documentary film on Tuesday, Sept. 10, with Waller, an emeritus professor and former head of the Department of History, as one of the historians providing commentary in a new episode of the PBS documentary series American Experience, titled “The Feud.” The one-hour program airs at 9 p.m. on Connecticut Public Television. Waller says the feud represents a larger part of American history. Heard here on UConn 360. “For such a long time it’s been regarded an aberrant event in a strange place,” she says. “The coming of capitalism to Appalachia was what really precipitated all this violence and led to this feud. I had seen some of this before because I had originally studied New England during the early part of the 19th century, when …

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Streamflow variability brought on by climate change will negatively affect the survival of salamanders, according to a new study by the University of Montana, the University of Connecticut, and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. The researchers discovered that streamflow variability — fluctuations between low and high flows brought about by climate change — can kill salamanders while they are metamorphosing from larvae to adults. The work was published in the Sept. 5 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In our studies, we find that rivers are changing and not for the better. They are getting saltier, warmer, and more alkaline,” says study author Gene E. Likens, distinguished research professor at UConn and president emeritus of the Cary Institute. “It is a concern and it is a surprise to see that this is happening all over the world.” Likens and colleagues studied spring salamanders living in five New Hampshire streams. Using a 20-year data set from Merrill Brook in New Hampshire, the researchers showed the abundance of spring salamander adults declined about 50% since 1999. The researchers then studied whether streamflow variability at Merrill Brook and streams in the nearby Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest affected the survival of salamanders metamorphosing from larvae …

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It is hard to get people excited about software, says Eliza Grames, a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology. Yet, the software she has developed is exciting for anyone about to embark on a new research and trying to determine whether it’s actually … new. Put yourself into the shoes of a researcher. Before any new study, a thorough and exhaustive review of existing literature must be done to make sure the project is novel. Or, to determine whether there is existing data that may be used to answer a their new question. This is a daunting task, especially considering that millions of new research articles are published each year. Where does one even begin to explore all of that data? “Each new study contributes more to what we know about a topic, adding nuance and complexity that helps improve our understanding of the natural world. To make sense of this wealth of evidence and get closer to a complete picture of the world, researchers are increasingly turning to systematic review methods as a way to synthesize this information,” says Grames. Systematic reviews started in the fields of medicine and public health, where keeping current with research can be, quite literally, a question of life or death, says Grames. …

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It seems unimaginable that intense, self-inflicted pain can result in an individual feeling much better, but that was the case with a longstanding ritual studied by researchers at the University of Connecticut. Their study, published in Current Anthropology, reports significant positive psychological outcomes and increased perceived well-being in participants who performed an extreme annual ritual as part of a national celebration. Dimitris Xygalatas, assistant professor of anthropology, studies all kinds of rituals and tends to see them everywhere in daily life. However, the bloody physical rigor endured by Tamil Hindus in Mauritius is very different from the holidays and sports rituals familiar to those in the United States. “Ritual is something that has no clear function, we just do it because we do it,” says Xygalatas, whose findings may provide insight into other extreme behaviors, such as ultramarathons or fire walking. “The reason they have survived is because they have specific benefits.” The researchers designed a real-life experiment to measure the psycho-physiological responses of those who participate in kavadi attam, not only during the ritual, but for weeks before and after the event. They did this by enlisting some 37 participants to wear a non-intrusive sensor, much like a Fitbit, as an armband. (Photo courtesy of Dimitris Xygalatas) The …

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This semester the Center for Career Development and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) will launch a new initiative to help CLAS students find the career development opportunities most suited for them. New badges will appear on promotional materials for UConn career events that address the specific needs of liberal arts and sciences majors. They will also mark programs put on by the Center for Career Development that are open to all students but benefit CLAS majors in particular. “We frequently hear students in CLAS say that they think our signature events, like the all-campus Career Fairs, are exclusively for business or engineering majors,” says Lisa Famularo, a CLAS career consultant in the Center for Career Development. “We hope this badge can help shift students’ perceptions and draw attention to the fact that liberal arts and sciences majors can draw a lot of value out of these programs.” Each year the UConn Center for Career Development hosts about 600 events focused on topics like exploring job paths, professional networking, and finding internships. These events often bring UConn alumni and employers to campus to connect with and recruit current students. The Center also hosts one-on-one career coaching appointments where students can speak to …

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In June, President Trump promised that his administration would work to deport “millions of illegal aliens” from the U.S. via increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and a ramping up of Border Patrol agents. Now, Associate Professor of Anthropology Sarah Willen has released a book chronicling nearly 20 years of work with migrant communities in Tel Aviv, Israel, where similar deportation campaigns have rocked undocumented migrant communities in the last two decades—including a campaign targeting Filipino caregivers and their Israeli-born children that was launched earlier this month. The book, titled Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins, draws on Willen’s ethnographic fieldwork and personal relationships with migrants in Tel Aviv to share stories of people’s lives: their migration experiences, and their daily struggles as migrants, but also as parents, friends, employees, parishioners, and community members. “Beyond just struggle or suffering, the book gives voice to the hopes, dreams, and desires of the people I came to know,” she says. “It also explores how ideologies and government policies create dividing lines, and how they impose ideas of inclusion and exclusion.” After the Second Intifada in 2000, military closures on the West Bank meant that Palestinians, who were vital to the Israeli workforce, could …

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Plastic continues to make big news, especially in Connecticut where a single-use plastic bag fee took effect on August 1st. With estimates of 4.8 to 12.7 million tons of plastic finding its way to the world’s oceans in a single year, the single-use plastic bag fee is aimed to reduce the amount of plastic used throughout the state. The measure has stirred up questions about plastics and their environmental impacts. UConn associate professor of chemistry Nicholas Leadbeater is here to help answer some of these questions. Q: Why are plastics so bad for the environment? Do they eventually degrade? If so, how long does it take? A: Regular plastics with none of these additives put in them take a really long time to degrade – like hundreds of years. Regular plastics with the additives can be tuned to degrade in a few months. Bioplastics can degrade fast or slow (in the case of durable plastics). Compostable plastics can degrade in 3-6 months. Q: What is plastic, anyway? How is it made? A: In broad terms, plastics are polymers. Polymers are made up of repeating units of small molecules joined together to make big chains. This can include other natural molecules like DNA and proteins, which count as polymers too. Not …

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Physicists used to think that superconductivity – electricity flowing without resistance or loss – was an all or nothing phenomenon. But new evidence suggests that, at least in copper oxide superconductors, it’s not so clear cut. Superconductors have amazing properties, and in principle could be used to build loss-free transmission lines and magnetic trains that levitate above superconducting tracks. But most superconductors only work at temperatures close to absolute zero. This temperature, called the critical temperature, is often only a few degrees Kelvin and requires liquid helium to stay that cold, making such superconductors too expensive for most commercial uses. A few superconductors, however, have a much warmer critical temperature, closer to the temperature of liquid nitrogen (77K), which is much more affordable.  Many of these higher-temperature superconductors are based on a two-dimensional form of copper oxide.  “If we understood why copper oxide is a superconductor at such high temperatures, we might be able to synthesize a better one” that works closer to room temperature (293K), says UConn physicist Ilya Sochnikov. Sochnikov and his colleagues at Rice University, Brookhaven National Lab and Yale recently figured out part of that puzzle, and they report their results in the latest issue of Nature. Their discovery was about how electrons …

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When Carlos Trallero started his academic career in physics, he had no idea he would become a pioneer in a field of research that uses high-power lasers to investigate atomic and molecular physical phenomena. Originally from Cuba, where there isn’t much funding for experimental research, Trallero began his academic career by studying theoretical physics. But as a senior graduate student at Stony Brook University, he got the chance to work in a lab doing experimental work and quickly recognized it was his true passion. “I talked to a professor doing experimentation with ultra-fast lasers and I fell in love with it. And at first, I sucked at it — I was horrible,” says the professor of physics who is now working with four research grants funding separate investigations. Trallero works with very short laser beams, with an emphasis on very short. The lasers he uses can pulse with attosecond precision. As a comparison, there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds in the entire history of the universe since the Big Bang. It takes light half an attosecond to cross the orbit of hydrogen, the smallest atom. When trying to study something that fast, scientists need the kind of precision …

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