The Academic Minute

Academic Minute

Astronomy to Zoology www.academicminute.org

  1. 15 hr ago

    Colleen Heflin, Syracuse University - New SNAP Rules Threaten the Ability of Older Adults to Retire and Live With Dignity

    Taxpayers will be footing the bill for reduced SNAP benefits for older adults. Colleen Heflin, professor of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University, explains why. Faculty Bio: Colleen Heflin is a professor of public administration and international affairs. She is also a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research and a research affiliate in the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health. She has served as associate dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and chair of the Public Administration and International Affairs Department.As a research and policy scholar for over twenty-five years, Heflin is regarded as a national expert on food insecurity, poverty and social policy. Heflin’s research has helped document the causes and consequences of food insecurity, identify the barriers and consequences of participation in nutrition programs, and understand the changing role of the public safety net in the lives of low-income Americans.Heflin has published over 80 research articles, and her work has appeared in leading journals such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Problems, Health Affairs, Medical Care, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Her research is regularly funded by the National Institutes for Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. From 2012-2017, Heflin was supported by a five-year award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service as Family Self-Sufficiency and Stability Research Scholar to explore how multiple program participation affects vulnerable families’ well-being.Heflin has experience engaging with federal policymakers, providing expert testimony before Congress, providing technical assistance to states working to improve access to food and nutrition assistance programs, and working with county agencies to redesign their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) application process. She founded the University of Missouri Federal Statistical Research Data Center and Missouri Population, Education and Health Center. She received the W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association in 2014. Transcript: Nationally, one in five of all SNAP recipients are over age 60. Until now, older adults were not subject to work requirements like their younger counterparts. But provisions in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill limit SNAP benefits for adults ages 60 to 64 without a dependent or disability to three months within a 36-month period unless they can show that they are spending 80-hours per month in work, training, or volunteer activities. Work requirements for programs like SNAP and Medicaid do not lead to increased work but instead result in fewer people receiving benefits. Nonetheless, an even more onerous version of work requirements were expanded for other groups as well, including adults 55-59, those with children who reach age 14, veterans, the homeless, and foster care youth.Reducing older adults’ access to SNAP is particularly shortsighted given the strength of the evidence regarding SNAP’s effectiveness at reducing food insecurity, which already affects 1 in 10 adults over age 60 nationally. Since food insecurity is associated with poor health, the ability to consistently afford nutritious food is considered important enough that the Veterans Health Administration, among others, now regularly screen for food insecurity. Because SNAP participation is associated with $1,400 in health care savings per year, reducing access will increase health care costs in the long run. And the increased health care costs will largely be shouldered by taxpayers since the federal government covers medical costs after age 65 through Medicare and many SNAP participants qualify for Medicaid. It is already too difficult for older adults to obtain SNAP benefits. Currently, just over one in two adults age 60 and older who qualify for SNAP participate. Increasing work requirements is a step in the wrong direction and will decrease SNAP participation, increase food insecurity, and make it harder to cope with diabetes and hypertension, increasing the public costs of Medicaid and Medicare. Read More: [Russell Sage Foundation] - Food for Thought: Understanding Older Adult Food Insecurity This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  2. 3 days ago

    Nancy Huang, Texas A&M University - Inside the Cell’s Secret Droplets

    One aggressive form of cancer can be set off by an accident in our cells. How do we fight this? Nancy Huang, professor at the Institute of Biosciences and Technology at Texas A&M University, examines. Faculty Bio: Yun (Nancy) Huang, PhD, is a professor at Texas A&M University Institute of Biosciences and Technology and Associate Director of the Center for Epigenetic and Disease Prevention (CEDP) in the Department of Translational Medical Sciences at the Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine. A principal investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health, the CPRIT, the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association, Dr. Huang’s research focuses on investigating transcriptional regulatory mechanisms that support normal development and on how epigenetic defects contribute to pathological conditions, including aging and cancer. Her work involves advanced understanding of TET enzymes and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine, pioneering tools to study the “sixth DNA base” and its role in gene regulation and disease. As a highly recognized scientist with over 120 publications and numerous awards, Dr. Huang leads innovative studies at Texas A&M’s Institute of Biosciences and Technology, supported by multiple major research grants. She received her medical degree from Zhejiang University School of Medicine and her doctorate in biochemistry from Georgia State University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and La Jolla Institute. Transcript: Sometimes, a single glitch in our DNA can rewrite a cell’s destiny. In one rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer—called translocation renal cell carcinoma, or translocation kidney cancer—two genes that should never touch break apart and fuse together. That tiny accident sets off a biological chain reaction that turns normal kidney cells into unstoppable cancer factories.This disease mostly affects children and young adults, and one of its key culprits is a gene known as Transcription Factor E3, or TFE3. When TFE3 fuses with another gene, it creates a hybrid called a TFE3 oncofusion—a molecular impostor that rewires how genes are switched on and off. For years, researchers suspected these fusions somehow “supercharged” the cell’s control systems, but the underlying mechanism remained unclear.Now, scientists led by Dr. Lei Guo, Dr. Yubin Zhou, and Dr. Yun Huang, reports that many TFE3 fusion partners can bind to ribonucleic acid (RNA)—the messenger molecule that carries instructions from DNA.This RNA-binding ability lets the hybrid protein form microscopic droplet-like structures, known as biomolecular condensates, inside the cell nucleus. Within these droplets, TFE3 oncofusions pull together key gene-activation engines such as RNA polymerase II and paraspeckle component 1 (PSPC1), creating powerful “gene hubs” that drive cancer growth.Even more remarkably, the team designed a nanobody-based chemogenetic tool that can dissolve these droplets on demand. When they triggered it, the condensates broke apart—and tumor growth slowed sharply in both cultured cells and mice.By revealing how cancer cells weaponize these tiny droplets, the discovery opens a bold new way to disarm fusion-driven cancers—not by blocking genes, but by melting their molecular engines. Read More: [Nature] - RNA-mediated condensation of TFE3 oncofusions facilitates transcriptional hub formation to promote translocation renal cell carcinoma [Vital Record from TAMU] - Disrupting cancer’s secret hubs: A new way to halt tumor growth [EurekAlert!] - Disrupting cancer’s secret hubs: A new way to halt tumor growth This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  3. 4 days ago

    Amaryllis Tsiknia, University of Southern California - Novel Markers May Offer Early Clues to Alzheimer’s Risk

    We are always looking for new ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease early. Amaryllis Tsiknia, neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, may have found a clue. Faculty Bio: Amaryllis is a 4th-year neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. She completed her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley with a degree in Cognitive Science, and then acquired her Master’s degree in Neuroimaging and Informatics. Her current research uses neuroimaging techniques to uncover how metabolic and vascular factors increase our risk for dementia with a special focus on type 2 diabetes mellitus. Transcript: Alzheimer’s disease is often discussed in terms of amyloid plaques and memory loss. But changes in how the brain manages blood flow and oxygen may also provide important early clues about risk.In our research, we studied older adults with and without cognitive impairment and looked at whether measures of cerebrovascular function were linked to known markers of Alzheimer’s risk.We used two noninvasive tools while participants rested quietly. One measured how fast blood moves through the major arteries in the brain. The other measured blood oxygen levels in the brain tissue near the surface of the cortex. We then used mathematical models to summarize how well the brain adjusts blood flow and oxygen levels in response to normal changes in blood pressure and carbon dioxide.What we found was notable. People with healthier vascular patterns, meaning blood vessels that behaved more like those seen in cognitively healthy aging, tended to have lower amyloid burden and larger hippocampal volume. The hippocampus is a brain region that is essential for memory, and smaller hippocampal volume is associated with greater Alzheimer’s risk.We also found that people with mild cognitive impairment or dementia showed poorer vascular indicators than cognitively normal adults.These findings suggest that cerebrovascular function is closely related to brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s risk and may be part of the disease continuum.Just as importantly, these measures are relatively low-cost and noninvasive compared with some other brain imaging approaches, and they do not require injections, radiation, or active participation during testing.This study does not prove cause and effect, but it supports ongoing work to test whether these vascular signals can help identify higher-risk individuals earlier and track brain health over time. Read More: [Keck School of Medicine at USC] - Novel markers of brain blood flow and oxygenation may offer early clues to Alzheimer’s risk This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  4. 5 days ago

    Kim Plofker, Union College - International Math in 18th-century India

    Collaboration in mathematics has a long history. Kim Plofker, associate professor of mathematics at Union College, examines this. Faculty Bio: Kim Plofker is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She received her doctorate from the Department of the History of Mathematics at Brown University in 1995. Her research focuses on the history of mathematics and astronomy in India and its connections with Islamic and early modern European science. Kim Plofker’s books include Mathematics in India (Princeton, 2009); (with Anuj Misra and Clemency Montelle) The Sanskrit Astronomical Table Text Brahmatulyasarini (Brill, 2021); and (with Clemency Montelle and Glen Van Brummelen) From Samarqand to Jaipur: Evolving al-Kashi’s Approximation to the Sine of One Degree (Springer, 2025). Transcript: When you took math tests in school, the teacher told you to keep your eyes on your own paper. But the history of mathematical sciences in the real world is full of professional scientists glancing at their neighbors’ work, and often expanding it through ingenious discoveries of their own. In the days before modern physics and the automated clocks, calendars and computers arising from it, timekeeping methods and models of the universe were major scientific enterprises, and often quite controversial. Mathematicians from many different schools and cultures competed to develop theoretical models and computational techniques that were the most efficient, the most empirically accurate, or just the most impressively clever. And when they encountered a foreign visitor doing some interesting math in a different language, they called in a translator and got to work exchanging ideas. My current research focuses on a group of scholars in early 18th-century India, including Hindu and Muslim court astronomers writing in Sanskrit and Persian respectively, as well as European Jesuit missionaries bringing printed books in Latin. This was barely a century after the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition, so scientific hypotheses about the earth orbiting the sun instead of vice versa, and planets moving in elliptical orbits, were still somewhat debatable issues even in European astronomy. The Indian court astronomers were intrigued by these ideas although maybe not totally convinced, while the European visitors in turn were fascinated by some of the ingenious mathematical methods of their hosts. My colleagues and I are reading the manuscripts they created to find out more about how they put their ideas together. Read More: [Springer Nature] - From Samarqand to Jaipur Evolving al-Kāshī’s Approximation to the Sine of One Degree This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  5. 6 days ago

    Jonathan Lambert, New York University - Green Clay Tennis Courts Sequester Carbon Dioxide in Plain Sight

    What do green clay tennis courts have to do with climate change? Jonathan Lambert, visiting assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Climate Science at New York University, says it’s more than you might think. Faculty Bio: Jonathan Lambert is a geochemist and paleoclimatologist in the interdisciplinary-focused Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. His research themes are twofold - past climate change and modern climate solutions. In his paleoclimate research, he uses fossil plankton to reconstruct ocean conditions in the Pacific over the past 1.5 Million years. In his climate solutions work, he evaluates carbon dioxide removal strategies such as enhanced rock weathering, and develops new teaching and outreach approaches for emerging climate solutions. He teaches interdisciplinary seminars on ancient earth extremes, local climate change, and climate solutions. Dr. Lambert believes that engaging students of all backgrounds and interests in climate change education, outreach, and research is a bridge to better environmental understanding and contributes to lowering climate anxiety through the power of practical knowledge. Transcript: If you have seen one of the thousands of green clay tennis courts in America, you have witnessed a climate change mitigation technique called enhanced rock weathering. This is a natural process in which rocks like basalt undergo chemical weathering which converts atmospheric carbon dioxide into stable bicarbonate ions that do not contribute to global warming. Crushing these rocks and spreading them over large areas expedites weathering, and dozens of startups are applying this technique on farmland. Research is expanding on other suitable areas for enhanced weathering, and for our study we quantified its climate impact on green clay tennis courts – the American counterpart of the red clay courts common in Europe. As opposed to the crushed brick of red clay, all green clay courts are built using weatherable metabasalt. We used a database of 17,000 green clay courts and built a model to calculate the gross carbon sequestration at each court given the rocks’ grain size, chemical composition, and local air temperature. We also calculated carbon emissions associated with mining and transportation of material to each court during construction and maintenance. In total, we found that all courts in the US sequester a net total of approximately 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year – equivalent to the emissions of 4,200 passenger cars. Additionally, compared to the more common concrete courts, green clay courts emit at least 1.6 times less carbon dioxide from construction. Green clay courts therefore have high climate mitigation potential, and one simple opportunity to increase their carbon sequestration is to shift the proportion of newly built courts to favor clay over concrete. Additional climate benefits can be found by using smaller grain size materials for new clay courts, and by rigorously tracking and iterating on court maintenance practices. Read More: [NYU] - Green Clay Courts Serve Up Environmental Solutions by Absorbing Carbon Dioxide Pavia Lab at UW Carbon dioxide removal by enhanced weathering on American green clay tennis courts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  6. 10 Aug

    Victoria Fields, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - The National Alliance of Black Feminists

    Revisiting the history of the National Alliance of Black Feminists provides a new lens through which to view intersectionality. Victoria Fields, doctoral candidate and instructor of record in Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explores this. Faculty Bio: Victoria T. Fields is an award-winning educator and scholar. She is currently a doctoral candidate and instructor of record in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Victoria is also a graduate assistant for instructional design at the John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Higher Education, where she crafts content for Gardner Institute academies and co-leads faculty workshops on topics such as engaged pedagogy, moral imagination, and civic engagement in the classroom. Victoria’s research focuses on the rhetoric of Black women, archival rhetorics, and social movements. In 2025, Victoria was the recipient of the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Her work has been published in Volume 11 of the Eastern Michigan University McNair Scholars Journal and Bloomsbury Press, along with co-authorship in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the Sociology of Sport Journal, and Political Communication. Transcript: As Black women were excluded from leadership in both the Black Freedom Movement and mainstream white feminism, they turned to one another to form independent organizations and advance critiques of racism, sexism, and capitalism—grounding their intersectional oppression within their lived experiences. One of the organizations that arose was the National Alliance of Black Feminists, or NABF, a nonprofit organization, active between 1976-1981 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. NABF was committed to achieving full equality for Black women in America. NABF was led by founder and executive director Brenda Eichelberger, who was a guidance counselor in the Chicago Public Schools. NABF used media to promote and generate critical awareness of Black women’s intersectional oppression. Their efforts are seen in public appearances on the Phil Donahue Show, published essays in the Chicago Defender, women’s news for a Change…and Essence Magazine. In addition, NABF led, organized, and facilitated consciousness-raising sessions, conferences, and assertiveness training for Black women. These rhetorical strategies functioned as key sites of NABF’s engagement in political education and organizing, yet the NABF has been understudied and undervalued within dominant historical and feminist scholarship. Revisiting the NABF allows us to uncover the depth and complexity of their rhetorical strategies and contributions to what we now recognize as “intersectionality.” NABF’s work rested on the premise that Black feminism is infused with humanism, linking their identity as Black women to humanity, one that has historically been subject to surveillance, regulation, and violence. They recreated the Bill of Rights through a Black feminist lens—insisting that dignity, agency, and liberation are inseparable. While the NABF was short-lived, the Alliance reframed ephemerality not as failure but as an intentional and responsive space for Black feminist organizing. The NABF’s legacy offers a living template of constructive engagement guiding our collective journey toward liberation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  7. 7 Aug

    Nick Solomey, Wichita State University - Helping NASA Study Energy From The Solar Core

    On Wichita State University Week: What can we learn about the core of the Sun? Nick Solomey, professor at the Farimount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, looks for answers. Faculty Bio: Nickolas Solomey’s research is in the area of experimental particle and astroparticle physics, in the past he worked extensively on quark flavor physics by rare decays of hadrons, CP violation with Kaons, the study of nuclear states of matter and hadronic interaction physics. He was the co-spokesman of the Fermilab E907 experiment. He is also author of the book The Elusive Neutrino, and continues as editor of the Conference series on Hyperon, Charm and Beauty Hadrons, and has over 200 referred articles in physics research. His current experiments include neutrino experiments of NOvA and DUNE at Fermilab, and he is the PI of a new NASA project Neutrino Solar Orbiting Laboratory that aims to do unique neutrino science with a neutrino space-craft. Since 2018 he has been NASA Innovation Advanced Concept Fellow. Transcript: In 2016, I brought what many considered a “crazy” idea to NASA. It relates to neutrinos, which are mysterious subatomic particles that can go through matter as if it’s not there. Neutrinos should be massless, but we’ve proven they have mass. Most neutrino detectors are massive and experiments must be conducted underground. I suggested studying solar neutrinos, and noted that a small detector would be powerful enough to allow us to learn more about the solar neutrinos produced inside the Sun’s core. At the time, NASA was preparing to launch a spacecraft that would travel close to the Sun. Named the Parker Solar Probe, it entered space in 2018 and is still making close passes by the Sun. Solar neutrinos fly directly to and through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, and the number of these particles increases dramatically closer to the Sun—about 1,000 times higher at seven solar radii than at Earth. A detector placed there becomes effectively 1,000 times more powerful. Building a 250-killigram detector would result in, by far, the largest terrestrial solar neutrino experiment ever. The detector would allow us to study the nuclear fusion core of the Sun in unprecedented detail, and to investigate neutrino properties in new ways, including measuring how solar neutrinos change with distance. We’re now preparing to launch a .1 kg test detector into low-Earth polar orbit, with funding to operate it for one year. Ultimately, we hope to propose a small spacecraft carrying an approximately 250 kg detector close to the Sun. Operating for 5 to 10 years, such a mission would dramatically improve our understanding of the Sun’s fusion core—the source of the energy that sustains life on Earth. Read More: In-Space Neutrino Detection This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

  8. 6 Aug

    Waruna Seneviratne, Wichita State University - Automated Toolless Manufacturing of Composite Structures in Space

    On Wichita State University Week: Reducing lift-off weight can be crucial for spaceflight. Waruna Seneviratne, director of the Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems (ATLAS) at the National Institute for Aviation Research, explores one way to do so. Faculty Bio: Waruna Seneviratne is the Director of the Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems (ATLAS) at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), Wichita State University. With over 25 years at NIAR, he leads a diverse research portfolio in advanced manufacturing, inspection, durability, damage tolerance, certification, and aging of composite aircraft structures—supported by agencies including the FAA, DoD, DHS, NASA, and major aerospace manufacturers. In 2019, he founded the NIAR ATLAS Manufacturing Innovation Center to create a makerspace-style environment for accelerating advanced manufacturing research and prototyping. He also leads the Manufacturing for Affordable Sustainable Composites (MASC) initiative, sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab, which focuses on integrating in-process inspection technologies into manufacturing. His team’s automated fiber placement (AFP) inspection system received the 2023 JEC Composites Innovation Award for Digital, AI & Data. In 2024, his work on thermoplastic injection overmolded aircraft window plugs—adapting automotive technologies for high-rate aerospace production—earned both the Best Technical Paper Award at SAMPE and the CAMX Innovation Award. Waruna serves on the Technical Oversight Committee for NASA’s Advanced Composites Consortium (HiCAM) and the Executive Steering Committee for the Office of Naval Research’s Composites Manufacturing Technology Center through The Composites Consortium. He is a recipient of NASA’s Group Achievement Award (2022) for his contributions to the Advanced Composites Project, and the “Turning Goals into Reality” Honor Award (2002) for his work with the AGATE Alliance. Before joining NIAR, Waruna worked as a stress analyst on the Airbus A380 program, ensuring compliance with FAA and EASA certification standards. He holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Wichita State University and has lived in Wichita for over 30 years. Transcript: Today’s space structures are built to survive one of the most violent environments imaginable—launch. As a result, they are often overdesigned, carrying extra mass, cost, and complexity just to endure those few critical minutes. At the same time, everything we send to space must fit within the space of a payload bay. This constraint forces engineers to fold structures into compact, origami-like forms—packed with joints, motors, and deployment mechanisms that add weight, introduce risk, and create potential points of failure. But what if we didn’t have to build everything on Earth? What if we could build them in space instead? To meet this challenge, a new approach is emerging: Automated Tool-less Manufacturing, or AToM. This system uses two coordinated robotic arms to fabricate high-performance thermoplastic composite structures directly in space. Working together, they place continuous fibers with precision, creating strong, lightweight, three-dimensional parts—without molds, without ovens or autocalves, and without the constraints of traditional manufacturing. Think of it as additive manufacturing—but engineered for structural strength with continuous fiber composites. The impact is transformative. By eliminating tooling and reducing dependence on multiple launches, AToM removes traditional limits on size, weight, and complexity. Structures no longer need to fold or deploy—they can be built exactly as designed, with fewer joints and far less mechanical complexity and weight. And this isn’t theoretical. At the NIAR ATLAS Manufacturing Innovation Center, this technology has already demonstrated the ability to rapidly produce aerospace-quality composite structures on-site. Even more, the thermoplastic materials used are recyclable—opening the door to a circular manufacturing economy in space, where every resource matters. From orbit to the Moon, to Mars and beyond, this technology redefines not just how we build—but where we build. Read More: Advanced Technologies Lab for Aerospace Systems - ATLAS New Technology Can Create Composite Structures in Space In-Situ Consolidation Thermoplastic Process Development for Toolless Automated Fiber Placement Manufacturing in Space This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.academicminute.org

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