Multidisciplinary team will apply quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP), a technology widely used in environmental microbiome sciences
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a type of dementia that affects memory, thinking and behavior. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, an estimated 6.2 million Americans are living with this progressive neurologic disorder, and it is the sixth-leading… Read more
The tiny cosmos of organisms living on a streamer of algae in a river—the algal microbiome—could help scientists learn what turns an environment from healthy to toxic and back again. A multidisciplinary team led by Northern Arizona University has won $3 million from the National Science Foundation to translate the codex contained in… Read more
As increasingly severe wildfires burn more of the North American West each year, how people living there use fuel treatments, such as prescribed burns or planting fire-resistant trees around their homes, can determine how destructive fires will be to communities. The National Science… Read more
In a first-of-its-kind warming experiment, researchers at Northern Arizona University found that microbes growth rate decreased over 15 years of warming. The research, published this week in Global Change Biology, showed that under warmer climate conditions, growth decreased among all types of microbes in the community, and suggested that a loss of soil carbon may be responsible… Read more
Program prepares students for STEM careers critically important to DOE mission
Graduate students Maria Bolar and Megan Foley are the first from Northern Arizona University to receive awards from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) through its Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program. Only 65 graduate students from across the country were recognized this year. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art… Read more
Xin Huang wants to make modeling and using big data easier for everyone, especially ecologists who don’t have extensive computer programming experience. As a third-year doctoral student in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University, Huang saw a technical barrier between the earth system modeling community and ecologists who want to improve models with data: coding.
That’s why she created a user interface called “MIDA”—model-independent data assimilation—which allows a scientist to improve a model with data without… Read more