Research, Scholarly and Creative Activities, and Discovery (RSCAD) News

January 21, 2016

The weekly RSCAD newsletter provides the latest research news, funding opportunities, and academic trends.

Announcements from the Office of the Vice President for Research

Registration, an agenda, and other details are available for the March 9 National Endowment for the Humanities Regional Application-Writing Workshop. Seating and individual appointments are limited, so register soon!

The 14th Annual Ecological Genomics Institute Symposium is scheduled for October 28-30, 2016, at the Country Club Plaza Marriott in Kansas City, Missouri. Congratulations to the institute for is newly established partnership with the journal Genome, which will publish a special issue with papers based on invited speaker presentations at the 2016 symposium. Read more in the institute’s newsletter.

K-State in the News

MediVet Biologics to Present University Study on Canine Stem Cells during 2016 North American Veterinary Conference

1/14/16 Houston Chronicle
MediVet Biologics, a privately held animal health biopharmaceutical company, will present new evidence on the use of ActiStem Therapy™, (Stem Cells) for the treatment of osteoarthritis in canines. The study conducted at Kansas State University was designed as a double-blind placebo controlled randomized trial. Dr. Mark Weiss will present the study on Tuesday, January 19th at 5:30 EST during the NAVC conference in the Miami Room at the Gaylord Hotel.

Don't Blame Your Kids: Teenagers' Role in Language Change is Overstated, Linguistics Research Finds

1/16/16 The Times of India, 1/14/16 Science Daily and EurekAlert!
From Science Daily: If you're too "basic" to "YOLO" or think that slang is never "on fleek," fear not: How teenagers speak IRL is not ruining the English language, according to Kansas State University linguistics research. In fact, teenagers may not be causing language change the way that we typically think, said Mary Kohn, assistant professor of English. Kohn studies language variation and how language changes over time.

Scientists Show a New Way to Absorb Electromagnetic Radiation

1/14/16 Science Daily and EurekAlert! and 1/17/16 Science 2.0
From Science Daily: A team of authors from MIPT, Kansas State University, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have demonstrated that it is possible to fully absorb electromagnetic radiation using an anisotropic crystal. The observations are of fundamental importance for electrodynamics and will provide researchers with an entirely new method of absorbing the energy of electromagnetic waves. The paper has been published in Physical Review B.

Project Will Put WWI Poetry by American Immigrants Online

1/15/16 Washington Times
American immigrants wrote an “enormous body” of poetry in response to World War I, a University of Kansas researcher says. But most isn’t readable without physically digging into a variety of repositories scattered across the country in various libraries and in various forms— from bound books to more fleeting forms of communication such as newsletters and papers. A digitization project is coming to the rescue, The Lawrence Journal-World reported. Lorie Vanchena, associate professor of German and academic director for the university’s European Studies Program, is teaming up with colleagues at Kansas State University on the project to create a digital archive of American poetry written in response to WWI.

New Poultry Vaccine to Fight Bird Flu Developed

1/12/16 The Poultry Site
A team of researchers at Kansas State University, in collaboration with Garcia-Sastre of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has developed a vaccine that protects poultry from multiple strains of avian influenza found in the US. The vaccine has the potential to be administered through water or into embryonated eggs, making it easier for poultry producers to vaccinate flocks.

From Our Peers

Measuring the 'Gap' in the Skills Gap

1/19/16 Huffington Post Business
The SGMI [Skills Gap Misery Index] is available as a convenient online resource. Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology (OSUIT) has partnered with SGMI developer, Gary Beach, to launch the official SGMI website. This new research tool is available free to anyone interested in plotting the effects of the U.S. skills gap. The SGMI website is maintained by OSUIT personnel and updated once a month. All SGMI calculations on the website are based on the most complete monthly data available.

Forensic Research on Modern Child Abuse Can Shed Light on Past Cultures

1/14/16 Bloomberg
Biological anthropologists look at skeletal remains of past cultures to gain insight into how earlier peoples lived, and forensic anthropologists work with modern-day law enforcement to decipher skeletal evidence and solve crimes. Forensic experts at North Carolina State University have now published guidance on how research into modern-day forensic analysis of child-abuse victims can be used to shed light on how children of earlier cultures were treated.

Racial Makeup of Labor Markets Affects Who Gets Job Leads

1/13/16 Bloomberg
Research from North Carolina State University and Rice University finds that the racial composition of a labor market plays a significant role in whether workers find out about job leads — regardless of the race of the worker. For example, in a job market that was 20 percent white, there was a 25 percent probability that a respondent had gotten an unsolicited job lead in the past year. But in a market that was 80 percent white, there was a 60 percent probability of a respondent having gotten such a lead.

New Seasons’ Partnership with OSU Yields First Commercialized Oregon Seaweed Product

1/12/16 Yahoo! Finance
Au revoir vinaigrette! New Seasons Market this week introduces Tamari with Dulse Seaweed Dressing & Marinade, the nation’s first commercially available product containing an Oregon-grown red seaweed called “dulse.” The Dulse Seaweed Dressing & Marinade is a joint effort between New Seasons Market, Oregon State University (OSU) and Dulse Foods. Tangy and versatile, the Asian-style dressing and marinade features a strain of nutrient-rich dulse sea vegetable grown at the (OSU) Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore., and is the result of extensive research and development based on consumer taste testing at the OSU Food Innovation Center.

Plague-Riddled Prairie Dogs a Model for Infectious Disease Spread

1/13/16 Science Daily
Every now and then, colonies of prairie dogs are wiped out by plague, an infectious disease most often associated with the Black Death of the 14th century. Plague doesn't usually kill people these days, but it's alive and well among the millions of ground-dwelling rodents of Colorado and other western states, notably the black-tailed prairie dog. They're resilient critters, though: following wholesale destruction of colonies, they seem to repopulate with a vengeance. Colorado State University biologists say this sporadic ebb and flow of prairie dog plague is an ideal model for the study of rare infectious zoonotic disease -- disease that can jump from wildlife to humans -- like MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) and Ebola.

New Funding Opportunities

The Funding Connection

The Funding Connection is a weekly publication of Research & Sponsored Programs. For more information about individual programs and for applications, please e-mail research@k-state.edu or call 785 532-6195.

Highlight from this week's Funding Connection: The Department of Defense requests proposals from university researchers and university-led teams for the Minerva Research Initiative, a university-led defense social science program seeking fundamental understanding of the social and cultural forces shaping U.S. strategic interests globally.

RSCAD Trending Topics

Journal (and Book) Storage

The scholarly database JSTOR may soon have to add more letters to its acronym. If its expansion into books continues to grow, “Journal Storage” may no longer be an appropriate name. In the past year alone, JSTOR has doubled its ebook sales and the number of participating libraries. After launching in 2013 with 20 publishers, 15,000 ebooks and zero library customers, those numbers now stand at 100, 40,000 and 1,000, respectively, said Frank Smith, director of Books at JSTOR. Of course, the database also offers access to more than 2,000 scholarly journals. There are several reasons behind the growth of Books at JSTOR. The most significant, however, may be that JSTOR, which is owned by the nonprofit Ithaka, is recognizing and capitalizing on the fact that the database often serves as a starting point for research. For many students and faculty members, that process no longer begins in the library.

Rise of the Planet of Political Science: How the Monkey Cage Went Ape

As an assistant professor at Princeton in 1999, the political scientist Kathleen McNamara co-wrote an article for Foreign Affairs urging more democratic oversight of the European Central Bank. The department reprimanded her for it. Junior faculty, like children in Victorian novels, were to be seen, not heard. Times have changed. Universities now generally encourage efforts to reach a broad public, although those efforts lend, as one scholar put it, more "warm atmospherics" than significant heft to hiring, promotion, and tenure portfolios. High-profile blogs like The Monkey Cage, started by George Washington University’s John Sides in 2007 and adopted by The Washington Post in 2013, have offered a platform for such outreach, bolstering political scientists’ sense of relevance and public engagement. The blogs, while influenced by political journalism’s hectic daily tempo, have also influenced that journalism, pressuring reporters to incorporate data-driven theory into their reporting to help contextualize the chaotic ups and downs of elections and wars, treaties and massacres. The poli-sci platforms — the mature crop that survived culling from the millennial blog boom — have "really changed the rhythms of how I work as a scholar," says McNamara, now tenured at Georgetown University. Once, if you weren’t Henry Kissinger, good luck getting anywhere near a major paper’s op-ed section. But now, while she’s working on long-term research projects, McNamara knows there’s a place for timely comment as events unfold, "a real broadening of the public service that we as scholars can provide.”

USDA Announces $3.8 Million Available to Help Producers Transition to Organic Farming

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced the availability of $3.8 million to support research, education, and extension projects that will assist current organic producers and those transitioning into organic farming. The funding is available through the Organic Transitions Program, administered by USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

New Directions in the Humanities: Call for Chapters — Current Trends in Graduate Historical Research Book Series

Students in masters and doctoral programs are invited to submit proposals from between 5,000 to 10,000 words on any historical topic. Suggested proposals include prior class research papers, independent study papers, and thesis chapters. Deadline: February 15, 2016.