The way scientists observe the oceans has come a long way. In the past, they used to rely on direct measurements and expensive technologies, but things are getting smarter now. New devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) are making it possible to gather more accurate and detailed information over larger areas. For regenerative seaweed farms, there is a significant challenge in that the *soil* is constantly turning over and both the crops and conditions can be invisible. Low cost sensor platforms can assist farmers in understanding the ocean and enhancing their ability to respond to potential environmental threats that may impact the farm.
What is the significance of this project?
Producing low-cost smart buoys is crucial for the advancement of regenerative seaweed farms. These smart buoys can play a vital role in monitoring various environmental factors and biological conditions of aquaculture systems, especially in seaweed farming. By developing affordable technology that can remotely monitor and collect real-time data, seaweed farmers can optimize their production processes, reduce costs, and enhance the sustainability of seaweed cultivation. Additionally, the use of smart buoys can contribute to a better understanding of how seaweed interacts with its surrounding environment, ultimately supporting the regenerative nature of seaweed farms
We will create four low-cost prototype ocean buoys that can measure temperature, pH, salinity, wave height, and wind direction. The prototype will take about six months including the design, manufacturing, and initial testing. Our plan has two main stages: first, we will lab-test the buoy to make sure it can measure conditions accurately in controlled environments.
The second stage will involve testing the buoys in the real environment at the largest wave in the world. We will place multiple buoys in different areas and monitor their performance for three months. This will help us understand how well the buoys work in real-world conditions and how well they can help with seaweed farming operations.
The WatAIR prototype to be developed/improved is a low-cost closed loop solution for removing CO2 from ambient air for use as algae feedstock. The WatAIR prototype is based around two reactors: CO2 capture and CO2 utilization.
In this design, ambient air is blown in to fluidize sorbent particles to selectively capture CO2. Once saturated, the sorbent is hydrated to release captured CO2 and output carbonated water for cultivating algae. The sorbent is then dried and the cycle repeats.
What is the context of this research?
The Waterloo Algae Integrated Removal (WatAIR) direct air capture prototype development is part of a submission to the OpenAir Collective’s yearly Carbon Removal Challenge, a worldwide challenge for students to create new processes, approaches and prototypes to remove carbon from the land, waters, or air. The WatAIR prototype has been a winner of the challenge in the Most Novel Approach category since the challenge began in 2022.
The WatAIR team is a part of the Engineers Without Borders University of Waterloo chapter and in accordance with the guiding principles of the organization, aims to develop a system that is both low-cost and open-source while also maintaining high standards for safety, scalability, and efficiency.
What is the significance of this project?
The WatAIR prototype implements a novel design in regards to moisture swing adsorption through several methods. The primary novelty is the application of a moisture swing sorbent in a fluidized bed column, where typical research uses packed bed columns or fixed-volume sorbent structures. The second is a novel pre-treatment method which, theoretically, would result in a greater ion exchange capacity for binding with CO2, increasing selectivity.
As well, part of the purpose of this prototype is to demonstrate the ability for carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) projects to be low-cost and open-access, contrary to current economic evaluations of CCUS projects in development.
What are the goals of the project?
In this next stage of development for the WatAIR prototype (May ’24 – Mar ’25), the goals are to (1) improve sensors in place to ensure accurate and consistent CO2 capture results, (2) trial different commercial sorbents and treatment methods to optimize CO2 capture efficiency, and (3) optimize the reactor design for minimized carbon impact of capture cycles.
The University of Florida has once again earned a 5-star ranking on Money magazine’s “Best Colleges in America” list. This marks the second consecutive year that UF has been recognized for its exceptional value, combining high-quality education with affordability. UF is the only university in Florida and the Southeastern Conference to receive this distinction from Money for 2024.
The magazine’s annual “Best Colleges in America” ranking evaluates institutions based on 25 factors, including quality of education, affordability, and student outcomes such as graduation rates and employment success. The magazine identified UF as one of the best bargains in higher education and named it a top-10 most affordable school.
“The University of Florida accomplishes great things,” said UF Board of Trustees Chairman Mori Hosseini. “For the second year in a row we’ve earned 5 stars on Money’s list of Best Colleges. We’re grateful for this honor, and we are committed to being both an elite and practical university that equips our students and moves our state forward.”
This year, Money magazine reviewed more than 700 public and private colleges across the U.S., and only 54 institutions earned 5-star rankings.
“This honor reflects UF’s dedication to delivering top-notch, affordable education,” UF President Ben Sasse said. “Our faculty, staff, and students continue to strive for excellence, ensuring that the University of Florida remains a leader in higher education. We will continue to build on this success, making UF a place where academic achievement and accessibility go hand in hand.”
The financial bargain students receive at UF is just one of the elements that Money considered for the ranking. To be included in the list, universities and colleges had to reach the median graduation rate for their category, which included public, private, or historically black colleges and universities. The ranking also required the university or college to have a higher graduation rate than other institutions of similar size.
The magazine estimated that the net price of a UF degree is roughly $88,000, not factoring in federal or state aid. The figure is significantly less than the median price among the colleges in the 2024-2025 rankings, according to Money.
UF also appeared on Money’s “Best Public Colleges in the U.S.” and “Best Colleges in the South” sublists. Money’s 2024 “Best Colleges in America” full list is available here.
Summer is just around the corner, and with it, more opportunities to have fun and frolic in the sun. But more time outside means more chances for another common warm-weather annoyance: mosquito bites.
University of Washington researchers are hoping those itchy bumps could soon become a thing of the past.
UW professor of biology Jeff Riffell.UW News
Jeffrey Riffell, a UW professor of biology, studies mosquito sensory systems, particularly their sense of smell. He and his team want to understand how mosquitoes find food, whether it be males — who drink nectar — or females, who drink blood when they are trying to produce eggs.
Riffell’s research has shown that hungry female mosquitoes find us by following a trail of scent cues, including chemicals exuded by our skin and sweat, as well as the carbon dioxide gas we exhale with each breath. Mosquitoes also like colors, at least certain ones. His team is investigating how the visual and olfactory senses work together to help a mosquito zero in for the final strike and get her blood meal.
In the United States, climate change is opening new habitats for mosquitos. Washington currently boasts 20 species, including ones that can transmit West Nile virus.
Knowing what attracts mosquitoes — males to flowers, females to people — can help develop better control and containment efforts against these insects, whose bites can also transmit malaria, Zika, dengue, yellow fever and other diseases. Traps that kill or poison mosquitoes, for example, would be more effective if they released a mosquito-attracting scent. Mosquito-borne illnesses kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. Riffell and his team hope their efforts can help take a bite out of those numbers.
For more information, contact Riffell at jriffell@uw.edu.
Simultaneously advancing biomaterials research with clinical applications and connecting researchers at well-resourced institutions with those rich in diverse talent is the aim of a new center. The National Institutes of Health is supporting this effort with a grant of $10.5 million.
The Humanity Unlocking Biomaterials (HUB) center, led by the University of Michigan and University of Washington, is designed to spur the development of biomaterials solutions that have potential in medical treatments. It will do this by bringing together researchers and providing seed funding to kickstart projects.
The proposal invokes a concept, known as centering margins, from the late Black feminist thinker bell hooks. She taught that, if rapid progress is to be made, those who occupy positions of power at the center of the group must partner with and make space for those at the periphery.
This works two ways in the field of biomaterials, according to HUB center leaders Lola Eniola-Adefeso, the Vennema Endowed Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, and Kelly Stevens, the James Chao-Yao Koh and Maria Lee Koh Endowed Engineering and Medicine Career Development Professor at the University of Washington.
“We have materials like hydrogels, degradable polymers, that we’re comfortable with, and we’ve been using those for two, three decades now, but there has been very limited translation,” said Eniola-Adefeso. “We make the case that we simply need to grab people who are at the margins of biomaterials, who could plug in and accelerate the research.”
They will seek out scientists and engineers whose work isn’t necessarily specific to biomaterials but could apply to the field. Their talents may be in computation and AI, active materials or synthetic proteins, for example. The bet is that new avenues for biomaterials are emerging and could progress quickly if the right connections are made.
The field of biomaterials, like many others in science, technology and medicine, has historically excluded Black, Latino and Indigenous individuals. Progress in rectifying this has been slow because demographic outsiders are expected to push their way into a center where no space has opened for them.
“One way that the HUB will address this disconnect is by funding the participation of students and faculty at minority-serving institutions,” said Stevens. An example she gave is Heritage University in Washington state, one of only two universities in the country that is both a Native-American-serving Non-Tribal Institution and Hispanic-Serving Institution.
“This will be a chance for our biomaterials field to learn new ways of thinking and welcome students from this exceptional University to the center of our field,” Stevens said.
The HUB center plans to open that space by fostering connections. Already, Eniola-Adefeso and Stevens run a Slack channel of more than 400 biomedical researchers. The channel supports discussions about project concepts.
In addition, the center will host in-person annual meetings to assess research directions, spark partnerships and distribute $5.7 million in seed grant money. Also envisioned are live sessions where outsiders to the field of biomaterials present on tools and approaches and pitch ideas.
The HUB center will also produce papers on research directions that the participants identify as likely to be fruitful.
Some of the nation’s most well-resourced research universities have committed to providing time at their facilities to HUB center participants. This is helpful for those from institutions initially organized around teaching, with less existing research infrastructure. Among such institutions are Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Eniola-Adefeso and Stevens are building on their experience distributing seed funds from a $500,000 grant from Genentech, which came in response to their 2021 call to action to correct the funding disparity faced by Black biomedical researchers. At the time, they had learned that Black biomedical researchers submit about five grant applications for every three that white researchers submit to get the same number of awards.
To partially address this, they distributed grants of $50,000 to 10 Black researchers whose applications for traditional Research Project Grants, known among scientists as R01s and worth roughly $500,000 each, had been rejected by the NIH.
“I’m happy to say, I believe 100% have subsequently got an R01 or something of that size,” said Eniola-Adefeso.
These successes underscore the case that Eniola-Adefeso, Stevens and their colleagues made in the #FundBlackScientists campaign: it’s not that the ideas aren’t good, it’s that the researchers aren’t playing on an even field. The new HUB center intends to continue democratizing participation and resource access.
After just one hour of training with Overjet’s dental AI technology, University of Florida dental students improved their ability to detect cavities by more than 40%.
Since December 2023, 100 students have gone through the training on Overjet’s module. For many, it was their first look into the AI-powered future of their field.
“Students absolutely loved it. They were a hundred percent focused,” said Anita Gohel, B.D.S., Ph.D., the chair of oral and maxillofacial diagnostic services in UF’s College of Dentistry. Gohel has supervised dozens of students who trained on Overjet’s system and is researching how the application can serve as a dental AI teaching tool.
Cavities – or caries, as dentists call them – are infamously difficult to diagnose on X-rays. Cavities appear as slightly different shades of gray on a monochrome radiograph, and only 20%-40% are typically identified. It’s particularly easy to miss small cavities, which can often be reversed with treatment instead of needing to be filled more invasively.
Trained and validated by hundreds of dentists and honed with machine learning, Overjet can detect caries, hardened plaque and many other structures essential to oral health. The caries-identification module that UF students trained with highlights cavities in bright colors and aids in creating a treatment plan. The machine identification helped students – some of whom had seen few X-rays in their training so far – start to identify cavities more confidently on their own.
In November of 2021, Mina Ghorbanifarajzadeh, D.M.D., a 2019 graduate of UF’s College of Dentistry and an early employee at Overjet, gave a presentation to her alma mater on the promise of the AI diagnostic tools Overjet was developing.
“I thought it was important to make sure that the students had access to information before they graduated about how these tools were transforming their field,” said Ghorbanifarajzadeh, now senior clinical manager at Overjet.
Ghorbanifarajzadeh’s visit eventually snowballed into an official collaboration between the College of Dentistry and Overjet. It was a natural fit. UF was pushing to expand AI education and research across the university, and Gohel was working with Isabel Garcia, D.D.S., M.P.H., dean of the College of Dentistry, to evaluate the machine learning tools on the market. Meanwhile, the college’s dean emeritus, Terri Dolan, D.D.S., had been named the chief dental officer at Overjet. She reached out to Garcia and offered to partner up.
In 2022, Overjet and the college partnered to incorporate the company’s AI education program, Overjet for Educators, into the UF curriculum.
“Part of what excites me about the tool is we have the opportunity to use it in the context of student training,” Garcia said. “Students can examine both the radiograph and the AI tool in the classroom, which provides an opportunity for the dental students to self-assess, which speeds up learning.”
Several students who have gone through the training have told Gohel they want to move into AI-focused careers. One student even decided to specialize in radiology because of their excitement about these dental AI systems.
“UF is the first dental school to incorporate our system into their curriculum,” Dolan said. “Students will graduate with a working knowledge of AI and computer vision.”
Patient upgrade
Soon, the College of Dentistry will adopt Overjet for patient care as well, eventually opening it up to the 100,000-plus patient visits the college provides every year. That means more accurate, earlier detection of cavities and better treatment plans for patients.
As part of the collaboration, Gohel tested the Overjet caries-identification module on over 1,000 cavities identified by expert dentists. In UF’s study, the module detected 91% of large caries and 69% of early-stage ones, making it far more sensitive than manual X-ray readings.
“I’m looking forward to incorporating Overjet technology into our patient care workflow. Students will benefit from visual and interactive diagnosis, and it will also have a positive impact on patient care,” Gohel said.
The University of Florida College of Pharmacy’s top-tier research programs garnered further recognition this week when the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, or AACP, ranked the college No. 3 nationally in annual research funding. Researchers in the college secured a record $41 million last year, surpassing the previous year’s total by nearly $9 million.
AACP compiles research data from more than 140 colleges of pharmacy around the county. For the third consecutive year, the UF College of Pharmacy ranked No. 3 in all three major categories where annual research funding is reported: NIH funding ($32.6 million), federal funding ($35.1 million), and total funding ($41 million).
The UF College of Pharmacy set new funding records in all three categories, and the AACP reported that 56 unique investigators in the college received grant funding.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. (June 28, 2024) — On this Fourth of July, University of Florida professor Jacob Chung, Ph.D., stands as the epitome of the American Dream.
In 1971, at age 23, he moved to the United States from Taiwan with one suitcase and $1,000. He had earned his bachelor’s degree from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and planned to become an aerospace engineer in America. He entered the master’s program in the nuclear engineering department at the University of Missouri.
“The feelings that I had at that time basically were excitement, hope and thankfulness about the opportunities ahead,” recalled Chung.
Now an esteemed professor with the UF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Chung was awarded the Exceptional Public Service Medal from NASA in late June. The award is among the highest honors bestowed by the NASA Glenn Research Center Awards Office and is “an acknowledgement of significant contributions to NASA’s mission and purpose,” according to the award letter.
“As an immigrant, I have been telling myself that I need to pay back my adopted country,” Chung said. “With this award, I feel that I have done my share of making contributions toward NASA’s mission and purpose, and also my patriotic work has been recognized.”
Chung earned the award due to his “exceptional, sustained, and multi-faceted contributions advancing NASA’s in-space cryogenic fluid management science and technologies over multiple programs and 30 years.”
“Dr. Chung’s exceptional research and his contributions to NASA are shaping the future of space exploration, bringing new possibilities to human discovery and tremendous pride to Gator Nation,” said UF President Ben Sasse. “As we continue to explore the moon, Mars, and beyond, innovators like Dr. Chung will drive us forward.”
“We are tremendously proud of Dr. Chung’s extraordinary contributions to NASA’s mission and purpose, epitomizing dedication and excellence in advancing in-space cryogenic fluid management over three decades,” said Forrest Masters, Ph.D., interim dean for the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. “This prestigious award not only recognizes Dr. Chung’s illustrious career but also underscores the significant impact he has made at the University of Florida.”
Chung’s work is primarily centered on in-space thermal-fluid management of traditional chemical rocket propulsion systems. He and his students have been conducting research for NASA on space thermal-fluid management technologies since 1992.
His contributions to NASA have focused on optimizing the use of propellants in rocket engines, which is essential for longer-distance space exploration. It is critical to human exploration of the moon, Mars, and, potentially, asteroids. NASA sees this exploration as a major focus going forward, which makes the effective, sufficient, and reliable supply of cryogenic propellants crucial.
Former Michigan State guard Shay Colley was named to the Canadian women’s basketball team set to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
This is the second Olympic appearance for Colley who also represented Canada at the 2020 Tokyo games.
Team Canada qualified for their fourth-straight Olympic Games, finishing third in one of four FIBA Women’s Olympic Qualification Tournaments last February. Paris will be Team Canada’s eighth appearance in the Olympic women’s basketball tournament since it debuted at Montreal 1976. It will be the first time in 24 years (Sydney 2000) that Canada’s women’s and men’s basketball teams will compete at the same Olympic Games.
Colley played three seasons at Michigan State with her last season coming during the 2019-20 campaign. As a Spartan, she averaged 12.6 points and 4.8 rebounds per game.
The women’s basketball tournament will take place from July 27 to Aug. 11 (Day 1 to 16). Pierre Mauroy Stadium in Lille will host the preliminary phase before the final games shift to Paris and Bercy Arena. Canada’s first tournament game will be on July 29 (11:15 a.m. ET) against host France.
This story originally appeared on MSUSpartans.com.
Former Michigan State athlete Tori Franklin has qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics in the triple jump.
Despite earning the bronze medal in the triple jump on June 22 at the U.S. trials, she did not have the Olympic standard and had to wait to officially be named to the team by USA Track & Field. The former Spartan standout finished third in the triple jump with a 13.72m leap.
In 2022, she earned bronze at the World Championships to become the first American woman to medal in the triple jump at a World Championship. No American has finished better than fourth at the Olympics in the event.
Franklin also competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, finishing 25th.
She still is the Michigan State record holder in the outdoor triple jump with a leap of 13.41m in 2013.
Track & field action at the Paris Olympics begins Aug. 1 and concludes Aug. 11. The qualifying round of the women’s triple jump is Friday, Aug. 2, with the finals being held on Saturday, Aug. 3.
This story originally appeared on MSUSpartans.com.
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