neonvincent

I found another video with more focus for Mass shooting at Michigan State University on eve of fifth anniversary of Parkland shooting.

I linked to the following video in Fantasy and reality about Paul Bunyan and his connections to Michigan on Paul Bunyan Day but didn't embed it. It's about the creator of one of the videos I used but isn't about the subject of the post.

Two days ago, I kicked off my entry on 1980s nostalgia fueling at least four Netflix "original" series by mentioning "Stranger Things."  I'm not alone in noticing that about the show.  Michigan State University posted a video on that very subject last year.  Here it is.


Just in time for Netflix’s “Stranger Things” season two premiere, Michigan State University Professor Gary Hoppenstand travels back to the 1980s to analyze the strange and supernatural world of the Upside Down. Hoppenstand, professor of English in the College of Arts and Letters, is an expert on pop culture and film studies. He discusses why ‘80s nostalgia is a powerful tool in “Stranger Things.”

"Stranger Things" has 12 Emmy nominations, so I will write about them on Crazy Eddie's Motie News and may just recycle this video, along with two others from MSU.

Last entry was the last weather story I wrote for Examiner.com. Today's entry is the last story I wrote as Detroit Science News Examiner from April 2016.

( MSU served tea, algae, and lemurs for Earth Week )

It wasn't the last article I wrote for Examiner.com. I continued writing as Washtenaw County Elections Examiner. I start with those articles tomorrow beginning with one from July 1, 2015.

When most people think of Michigan State University this time of year, it is about the Spartans playing Alabama's Crimson Tide in the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day with the possibility of playing for the national championship afterwards. But MSU has more to be proud of this year than football. Michigan's Land Grant University produces a lot of research that yields practical results for residents of the Great Lakes State, the nation, and the world.

Following are the top ten science stores from MSU as chosen by Layne Cameron, Spartan Science Storyteller. They comprise a diverse list ranging from human and animal medicine and materials science to biodiversity, physics, and science education.

( In addition to spanning a wide range of disciplines, the stories display the range of scales at which MSU research helps to improve the world. The studies and results listed range from the global down to the local, even to the level of the individual student. )

It's the weekend, which means it's time for me to select this week's news from midwestern universities about food and sustainability. Once again, Michigan State University has pride of place as the first Michigan university mentioned with the only two food stories.



Food

Michigan State University: MSU class building a better popcorn kernel

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A group of Michigan State University students is taking a course this semester that has the official title of “Science of the Foods we Love.” But most everybody knows it as the “popcorn course.”

That’s because in addition to teaching the students the finer points of scientific research, and how the worlds of science and industry come together, another result of the course might be a better kernel of popcorn.

With the help of a gift from ConAgra Foods, the maker of, among other things, Orville Redenbacher popcorn, the class is studying different aspects of popcorn (e.g., explosivity, hull thickness and kernel size distribution) as they relate to the overall quality of a popped bag of microwave popcorn.

Later this month the class will travel to ConAgra headquarters in Omaha, Neb., to present their findings to the company’s scientists.

As I wrote in one of my early linkspam posts:

The flip side of Purdue's concern with food is that it's very much in the pocket of industrial agriculture, and this article shows that relationship in unapologetic detail. Honestly, I find Michigan State University, where there is a program in organic agriculture that was created by student demand, to have a more progressive perspective, and MSU is also a land-grant agricultural college.

They may be more progressive, but they are still strongly connected to industrial agriculture.

Michigan State University: Oxygen sensor invention could benefit fisheries to breweries

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Monitoring oxygen levels in water has applications for oil spills, fish farming, brewing beer and more – and a professor at Michigan State University is poised to help supply that need.

The concept of oxygen sensors isn’t new. The challenge, however, has been manufacturing one that can withstand fluctuations in temperature, salinity, carbon dioxide, phosphates and biological wastes. Ruby Ghosh, associate professor of physics, was able to overcome those obstacles as well as build one that provides real-time data and is relatively inexpensive.
...
Constantly testing dissolved oxygen is critical in industries such as:

• Aquaculture – where fish are raised in oxygen-rich, high-density environments.
• Beverage manufacturing – which constantly monitors dissolved oxygen levels during the fermentation and bottling processes.
• Biomedical research – which could use probes to further cancer research by detecting changes in oxygen dependence in relation to tumor growth.
• Petroleum manufacturing – to monitor ocean oxygen levels and detect/prevent oil leaks in rugged, saltwater environments.

...
To test her prototypes, Ghosh and her students worked with Michigan’s fish farmers to see how they would hold up in a year-round, outdoor environment.

“My lab focuses on solving real-life problems through our technology,” Ghosh said. “Raising trout for recreational fishing is economically important to Michigan, and our prototype proved that our sensor performs well in the field and could help that industry thrive.”

Since the most read posts this month so far has been Detroit Food and Sustainability News for 4/4/11 and its popularity has been driven by Google searches for people searching for the news story about Russ Allen of Seafood Systems in Okemos and his proposal to raise shrimp in Detroit (Let's see what that phrase does for this post's Search Engine Optimization--muahahahahaha!), I decided to put this story about aquaculture above the fold as a food story.

More news stories about sustainability, science, economy, politics, and law at Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

Yet another night the post wrote itself.




UCLA squeaks by MSU 78-76. My undergraduate alma mater defeats my favorite grad school alma mater's cross-state rival to stay alive in the NCAA tournament. This is a good day for me during March Madness.

Continuing with selecting news posts with a common theme out of last week's Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday, I am posting three news items about Food. I'm planning on passing them out to my Global Politics of Food class tomorrow as current events and research to discuss. Why not get double duty out of them? After all, I was able to convince my department chair that compiling these articles was a form of professional development. :-)

( Articles from Michigan State University and Purdue University about Food Deserts, the causes of the rising prices of food, and the effects of overfertilizing corn grown for ethanol behind the cut. )

I have at most a week on my free paid user trial on LJ. I'd better load up that "all your bouillabaise are belong to us" icon that I'm using here on Dreamwidth there before it runs out. I could use a food icon, there, too.