Science

As you kiss under the mistletoe this holiday season, consider the biology of this plant. Parasitic to other plants, mistletoes leech water and nutrients to survive.

Methane. It's more than just the gas released when cows... release gas. It has a warming potential 25x higher than carbon dioxide. Researchers in Utah's Uinta Basin have been studying emissions of methane and other chemicals from natural gas drilling sites since 2015. They recently found that, despite gas production decreasing, methane leaks at these sites have remained the same. As the world works to reduce greenhouse gases, these research provides valuable insights into sources of these emissions.

Most of us don’t think about evolution often, if at all, and when we do we often conjure up images of Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands. Today, the study of evolution is largely driven by mathematics, complexity theory, and machine learning, but a more complete understanding of evolution can also provide us with an important perspective on our place as a little leaf on the giant tree of life. This week we’re talking about why you oughta care about evolution.

Many students and scientists at USU will be waking up before sunrise on Christmas Day to watch the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, an engineering marvel 25 years in the making.

Sara Freeman, Assistant Professor of Neurobiology at USU, received an early-career scientist grant to study the brain and social behavior of the coyote.

Oil and gas production in the Uinta Basin has slowed down over the past five years, but harmful natural gas leaks into the atmosphere remain high. Researchers have been measuring emissions in the Uinta Basin since 2015.

This week we take a deep dive into the ancient, exploring the world as it existed over 66 million years ago, in an attempt to understand our present and our future. Creatures called Mosasaurs once inhabited our seas. They’re long extinct now, victims of the fifth great extinction event, along with 80 percent of the species alive at that time. But their lives and their world may give us insight into our own.

We have a complicated relationship with bears. Ask any hiker what their greatest fear is, and running into a bear will be at the top of that list. But we want to see them too! People travel from all over the world to our national parks with the hope of sighting a bear. Bears play an important role in our history, culture, environment, and economy. This week we’re talking about why you should care about bears.

As the COVID-19 vaccine became available to younger populations in the US, pediatricians including Doctor Dongngan Truong with University of Utah Health, started to notice cases of myocarditis, which is essentially inflammation of the heart.

New research from Utah State University calls into question one of biology’s classic tales – the role of gray wolves in Yellowstone.