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The Sci-Files is hosted by Mari Dowling and Dimitri Joseph. Together they highlight the importance of science, especially student research at Michigan State University.
WDBM East Lansing.
Mari Dowling:Welcome to the Sci Files, an Impact 89 FM series that explores student research here at Michigan State University. We're your cohosts, Mari Dowling.
Dimitri Joseph:And Dimitri Joseph. Welcome, everyone. Today, we'll be interviewing students from Michigan State University Summer Research Opportunities Program. First, we'll begin with Candy, Candy Pier. Hi.
Dimitri Joseph:If you don't mind, could you could you introduce yourself and tell us what university you're from?
Kandy Pierre:Yes. My name is Candy Pier. I'm from Brooklyn, New York. I go to Medgar Evers College. I major in biology.
Kandy Pierre:My minor is in environmental science, and I'm here at Michigan State University doing scientific research with the famous David Rothstein. He works in the Department of Forestry, and we're studying poultry harvest affects the soil fertility.
Dimitri Joseph:Okay. Cool. That sounds like a very interesting topic.
Mari Dowling:Candy, very nice to meet you, and I hope you're having a good time here at Michigan State. Thank you. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what whole tree harvesting is. I've never heard that term before.
Kandy Pierre:Whole tree harvest is when the lumber industry harvest trees. They basically harvest a tree by one of a machine called a Filabuncher, which is my favorite word to say. They basically use that machine to grab the whole tree, rip it out of the ground, drag it to another loading area where they strip the trees off its branches, its roots, and they just put the trunks for what they need for lumber. Now what's left over is the tree slush, which is the root and branch and all those stuff. But what the lumber industry does is that they grind it up, put it into a truck and they drive away with it.
Kandy Pierre:Now the bacteria in the soil needs those tree slush to give nutrients back to the next tree that they're supposed to grow. And this lovely bacteria that's in the soil, turns that nutrients into ammonium and nitrates and trees cannot grow without that. And the fact that the lumber industry takes this away, it's not giving that back to the next tree that supposedly needs to be grown. So hence the reason why we're doing soil testing to see how much is being in the soil, how much is not there, if the repeating of the whole tree harvest is an issue as to why the trees are not growing as healthy and strong as they are. We're still doing testing.
Kandy Pierre:My internship's kinda short.
Dimitri Joseph:How long was this, this research program?
Kandy Pierre:It was for 11 weeks. But, you know, trees take a very long time to grow. So I'm gonna need to be here a little longer than that.
Mari Dowling:It sounds like you're doing really important research in terms of looking at, you know, the sustainability of the logging industry and the lumber industry. Mhmm. So if whole tree harvesting is something that's maybe not as sustainable for the ecosystem and the environment, then are there other methods of logging that you recommend or that you're looking into?
Kandy Pierre:There are already logging in the industry. They do different type of stripping of the trees, but this is just one of the ways that they use. It's easy for, I guess, the lumber industry to process everything. It's less financially for them, But there's other ways that they do do it. But I read in the Lumen website and it shows a different of when a tree's been harvest one time or it's been harvest numerous time.
Kandy Pierre:Hence our experiment was basically about one time harvest and two time harvest, where a tree basically is grown, put the plant 60 years ago and it's never been harvested or as opposed to another tree in the same area, they're parallel to each other, they're in the same soil, they're basically right across the tree from each other and that tree has planted the same time that the first tree has been planted. But that tree basically planted, grown for 30 years, then it harvested in that 30 years, then they replanted that tree in the same area and then harvested with the tree that has have not been harvested for 60 years so they're both being harvested at the same time and that's after it's been harvested that's when we do the soil testing. So we're testing the soil between the 2 time harvest and the first time harvest.
Dimitri Joseph:Yeah. I have a question. So earlier you mentioned that you're mostly interested in, ammonium. Is there a reason why you're you're focused on the ammonium and the nitrate?
Kandy Pierre:There's something called the nitrogen cycle. And the nitrogen cycle, there is about 78% of nitrogen in the air. Some people may think oxygen is the most in the air, but nitrogen is the most. And the reason why there's so much nitrogen in the air is because it circulate right back into the air. And nitrogen is a chemical compound that humans cannot break down and plants itself cannot break down.
Kandy Pierre:It has the 3 bonds, chemical bonds that is sealed together and human and trees can't do it. The only thing that can do that is a specific bacteria in the soil. So when the air the nitrogen in the air goes into the soil, this bacteria eats it and turns it into ammonium and nitrate, which is so fibrous. I just love these bacteria. And when it breaks it down, then the tree is able to absorb the the ammonium and the nitrates.
Kandy Pierre:That's the only way it can do it. So nitrogen by itself, no one as human and plants can't do that. Now when the tree absorbs the ammonium and nitrate, then animals eat it, then we eat the animal, and that goes into our body. And that also helps with our DNA, RNA, with our cells and create proteins and all that, so the whole cycles. Bacterias needs these tree slush to create ammonium nitrate, not just ammonium nitrate, but also calcium, phosphor, and potassium.
Kandy Pierre:So we also test those, but since they're our lab don't have the equipment to test those things, so we send it out to outside source, and that takes a longer time.
Mari Dowling:Thank you so much, Candy, for that explanation. It was it was great, and I learned a lot about something that I didn't know about the logging industry.
Kandy Pierre:Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Dimitri Joseph:Next up, we have Mohammed Al Galad.
Mohamed Elgallad:Hey, Dimitri. Thank you guys for having me today.
Dimitri Joseph:So if you don't mind, Mohammed, could you introduce yourself?
Mohamed Elgallad:Sure. So my name is Mohammed Al Galad. I'm from Queens, New York. Shout out to Astoria. And over the summer, I'm here in East Lansing, Michigan State University with doctor Andrea Case and doctor Chris Black Wood.
Mohamed Elgallad:First, I'd like to, like, just give a big shout out to plants because they're super powerful. They're also really cool, and they're the backbone of, like, all life. And I think they're super important to study and just to learn about.
Dimitri Joseph:What research were you able to get your hands on this summer?
Mohamed Elgallad:Over every summer, I tried to get, like, different experiences and perspectives and some, like, above ground because plants are above ground and also underground with their roots. This summer, I was working with their floral parts or, like, their reproductive organs. And if you guys ever went hiking or just looked at a prairie, you'll see, like, a lot of species coexisting together. So many different species. There's a lot that are closely related.
Mohamed Elgallad:In order for, like, closely related species to, like, live in the same environment together in peace, they have to overcome 2 things. So they have to not compete together for the same resources. So we see that a lot of examples of plants that try to compete with all their surrounding plants. There's the mustard family where they deposit a lot of chemicals that kinda suffocate other plants around. They kill their roots, and that's how they thrive.
Mohamed Elgallad:They just kill everyone around them. So that's not really coexisting. So in order for a plant to coexist with another, they have to stop competing. They also have to not breed together. So interbreeding is when 2 different species kinda breed together and make hybrids.
Mohamed Elgallad:And that's really not great for species because that ends up like eventually, they collapse into 1 species and both parent species, they just go extinct. So we're just trying to understand how different species can maintain, like, reproductive isolation. Neuroproductive isolation is when they kind of isolate themselves and not reproduce together and mate.
Dimitri Joseph:Why is losing the parent species a bad thing?
Mohamed Elgallad:That's that's a wonderful question. I mean, it's not necessarily a bad thing. In the world, if you look at the natural world, there's, like, so many things happening at the same time. There's species going extinct, new species coming up.
Dimitri Joseph:Mhmm.
Mohamed Elgallad:And both are not bad, but we're trying to understand why species maintain their genetic integrity and why they continue to be species, especially if they're closely related. There's usually, like, interlap between their traits, and they could breed together in the greenhouse, but they usually don't breed together in nature. We're trying to understand that. But back to your question of why is it hybrids can be better than their parents or more fit? That happens, but it's usually really, really rare.
Mohamed Elgallad:What usually happens in nature is when 2 different species interbreed together, the hybrids are usually less fit. They're usually sterile. They're usually less efficient than their parent.
Dimitri Joseph:How were you going about trying to answer this question?
Mohamed Elgallad:So pretty much we had the parents or, like, the different species, and we know in the greenhouse we can form or make hybrids. So we interbred them together in the greenhouse. We made hybrids. And throughout the summer, I worked on using a stereo microscope, and a stereo microscope is a microscope that usually has a camera, and it measures things that are not super tiny. So we're not looking at cells.
Mohamed Elgallad:We're looking at, like, a flower. And flowers are like medium size. So we use the survey microscope just to take images of these flowers, and we use the program called ImageJ to take certain measurements. So we measured how big the flower is. We measured the reproductive organs, and we measured certain traits like the angle of the reproductive column.
Mohamed Elgallad:And that's where the pollen usually is in the female organs. We just tried to collect over 34 floral traits. And our hypothesis is that if there are traits that are super important for these species to live on and not go extinct, they're probably gonna be really less variation. They're gonna be really, really conserved because if there's a lot of variation, it means it's not really important for their survival.
Dimitri Joseph:Next up, I think we have another New Yorker. Zim, if you don't mind, could you introduce yourself?
Isteaq Zim:My name is Ishtiaq Zim, but I usually go by Zim. I'm from New York. I'm a rising senior studying clinical psychology at CUNY Hunter College. The same school as as Mohammed and Chris.
Dimitri Joseph:What exactly are you studying here with your 11 weeks at MSU's strat program?
Isteaq Zim:I'm working with doctor Jason Moser and Keenan Sayers in the psychophysiology lab. We were studying the effects of exercise on anxiety and emotion regulation.
Mari Dowling:How did you go about that research?
Isteaq Zim:So they already had the data gathered from last year. And so I just ran, like, a moderation analysis with the data, which wasn't done before. In the moderation analysis, we use depression, anxiety, self efficacy, and worry as moderators.
Mari Dowling:So you said you're studying the effects of exercise on anxiety and emotion regulation, but how are you approaching that in terms of measuring objectively?
Isteaq Zim:So we used questionnaires, which might seem very subjective and unreliable, but there are studies that show that they're both valid and reliable, and they're also used in clinical practice to diagnose people. And we had these questionnaires measure levels of anxiety and emotion regulation, but also their levels of depression and self efficacy, which is the belief in oneself. It's like your how confident you are.
Dimitri Joseph:From what I'm hearing, there there should be a connection between people that exercise and how confident they are and how anxious they are.
Isteaq Zim:So we found that, people with higher levels of self efficacy after exercise, they had better emotion regulation. We also found that people with higher levels of depression had reduced anxiety after exercise.
Dimitri Joseph:Do your participants, do they already have an exercise regimen?
Isteaq Zim:When we screened our ensure that they were people who weren't past a certain point of active. There's a questionnaire that measures for physical activity. We only included people that didn't pass a certain point. If people are too active, they might be getting diminishing returns.
Mari Dowling:What was the thinking behind this project in terms of trying to find the connection between these two in relation to maybe other literature and research that's already been done?
Isteaq Zim:There's already research from, like, decades ago or, like, a decade and a half ago that already established the connection between exercise and reductions and anxiety and depression. So we just wanted, I guess, add more nuance to it and just see how other factors affect it, especially factors that affect clinical population.
Dimitri Joseph:What are some of the real world applications of your research?
Isteaq Zim:Eventually, we make exercise as, like, streamlined treatment method for mental illnesses because medication has side effects, and both medication and therapy can be expensive and time consuming.
Dimitri Joseph:Thank you for your research, Zim. I I appreciate it because it's one of those topics that seems intuitive where everyone knows that exercising regularly is beneficial, but but thanks for pinpointing the exact outcome may be improved by exercising.
Mari Dowling:So just one last question. I think I don't know if you've seen this, but there was an article that went viral fairly recently about dancing having the single largest effect on depression compared to any other, including other exercises, other pharmaceutical treatments, all of that. Yeah. Is that something that you've seen? And I was wondering if you had a comment on that.
Isteaq Zim:Yeah. I think that dancing is a form of cardio more than anything. Cardiovascular exercise seems to have greater reductions in anxiety and depression because it reduces your resting heart rate, and, that makes you calmer. And I think dancing is also a great way to socialize and bond with people. So I think that that combination of cardio and bonding really makes it the most effective.