It’s a known fact that snakes love open grass and warm environments. On the contrary, salamanders prefer cool spaces and water. The goal of her project was to examine how forest edges impact salamanders and snakes.
After completing her project, she concluded that salamanders are more tolerant of habitat fragmentations than snakes. Also, harsh edges and fragmentation present more challenges to certain species of salamanders.
Can three-parent babies exist?
Almost everyone was born with two biological parents. Even so, did you know that some people are born with three biological parents? Destiny Moton presented her project on how this phenomenon occurs.
She conducted her project in professor Suma Robinson’s Molecular Genetics class. To understand the concept of three-parent babies, it's important to first understand how the mitochondria works and why they are called the powerhouse of the cell.
The mitochondria’s main function is to produce energy for the cell. It’s also important to know that the mitochondria has its own set of DNA and is maternally inherited. This means that only mothers pass down their mitochondria DNA to their offsprings, not fathers.
Unfortunately, some mothers carry a mitochondrial disease. If they pass it on to their children, this can lead to issues with energy in the child's body, affecting muscles, organs and overall health.
To avoid this, doctors take a healthy mitochondrion from a donor and combine it with the mother's and father's DNA. This way, the baby gets its DNA from the mother and father, but its healthy mitochondria come from the donor, helping to prevent the disease.
Should we conform?
Dominic Ferraro did his research during his first-semester English class. Conformity is acting in line with societal norms or accepted standards. This usually takes place in schools, workplaces or simply around a large group setting.
Ferraro discovered that a father’s parental style tends to have a stronger effect on a child than a mother’s. He also learned that the parental type most likely to encourage a child is the authoritarian archetype.
Individuals with an authoritarian personality are likely to respect and follow authority figures without question.
In the end, Ferraro learned that conformity can be good because it forms students who are respectful, listen and love to learn. However, conformity can also be taken advantage of. For example, peer pressure may push individuals to conform to risky behaviors.
“I have learned that there are times that conformity can be useful, but we must not limit ourselves to acting in ways untruthful to ourselves,” he stated.
Can AI be creative?
Karen Jiang was interested to know just how creative AI could be. She was able to explore this through ChatGPT. She first tested ChatGPT’s knowledge, then explored its role in the theatre industry and if ChatGPT could make good cheese.
To start, she quickly discovered that ChatGPT is not as creative as it's made out to be. ChatGPT uses answers from the web and simply rewards the information. Also, AI is good at analyzing standard problems but lacks the ability to think outside the box.
Next, for its role in theatre, she made a few observations. AI is already transforming the creative industry, but its role remains debated. ChatGPT can write scripts and create digital actors, but many still see it as a tool rather than a replacement for human creators.
Finally, she posed the question, “can AI create good cheese?” The answer was surprisingly, yes! AI can push the boundaries in unexpected ways. Food creation and AI are not typically correlated. Yet, AI is now being used to develop unique flavors that even expert cheesemakers would not have imagined. Finally, some creativity!
Things are looking up!
People often over or underestimate things such as hills or traffic lights, and Montse Juarez wanted to test this idea herself through an experiment.
Experiment: The participants assumed a few different positions – upward, downward and horizontal. For each position, the participant was seated and told to look straight ahead. Then, they provided what they believed to be a verbal estimate of 90 degrees, depending on their position.
Results: People do overestimate the angles while in these positions. Upward and downward gain was overestimated by a gain of 1.56, the horizontal gain was overestimated by 1.25.
Calculation: To find out the overestimation, Juarez took their estimated point and divided it by the actual angle to get the gain. Each gain was compared to a gain of one, which is an accurate estimate.
Interested in doing student research?
If you are interested in conducting your own student research project, consider the resources on our Student Research web page. There is information on how to conduct research with faculty, how to obtain funding for your project and information about grants for attending research conferences.
