Thank you to everyone who voted for Lions Talk Science’s Best Blog Post of the Fall 2021 semester! The results are all in, and your favorite LTS article was "The Most Contagious Non-Disease: Yawning" written by Mariam Melkumyan! For her winning article, Mariam will receive a $25 gift card! Additionally, our randomly chosen voter to win a $10 gift card is Jordan Chang!  Congrats to … Continue reading Winner of Fall 2021 LTS Best Blog Post

By Hannah Johnson Figure 1: Heat map of the world showcasing the suitability of Dengue transmission1 Dengue fever is a severe viral disease that affects nearly 100 million people worldwide each year. Currently, the only treatment available for this disease is in symptom management; however, recently advances to treat disease etiology have been made2,5. In … Continue reading New Developments in Dengue Fever Treatment

By Victoria Vernail In 1986, geneticist Alec Jeffreys was the first to use DNA profiling techniques in a murder investigation. The use of DNA resulted in the release of an innocent suspect and eventual identification of the culprit.1 In the coming decades, DNA would become the backbone of forensic science, serving as evidence in over … Continue reading Does your brain know all your secrets?

By Gaelyn Lyons Yeast has been an essential tool to our society since the beginning of time. Beer, bread, and wine all use yeast due to their ability to undergo fermentation.1 Not only does yeast contribute to creating yummy food, but it also plays an important role in biomedical research. Many scientists, including some at … Continue reading From Bakery to Bench: How Scientists use Yeast for Biomedical Research

By Savanna Ledford Figure 1: Standard Time Act of 1918 (Robinson, R. & Vick, A. (2019). Does falling back an hour cause you to experience seasonal depression? You can thank Congress for that. Daylight savings time has been observed by most people in the United States since 1918 with the hopes that it will save … Continue reading BLT: A Treatment More Therapeutic Than The Sandwich

By Sonam Lhamo In the late 1940s and early 1950s, polio was a feared infectious disease in the U.S. During summers, when the disease peaked, parents would keep their children from going to swimming pools and movies for fear of their children contracting polio from infected children1. Polio is a highly contagious, infectious disease caused … Continue reading How We Almost Eradicated Polio

By Rebecca Fleeman As the sweet potato casserole gets passed down the table and you scoot your green beans over to make room, this Thanksgiving you may think “will I be able to finish all the food on my plate?”. By the end of the meal, you are absolutely stuffed, eating more than twice what … Continue reading How to Grow a 4th Stomach for Your Thanksgiving Feast

By Mike Sha             A common problem in robotics is finding all the possible positions the hand can end up. This is a question for algebraic geometry, which can be solved by homotopy continuation1. In this article, we’ll be taking the path of least resistance to these topics. Algebra is “the study of mathematical symbols … Continue reading Algebraic Geometry: A Bridge Between Equations and Shapes

By Julia Simpson An international team of roboticists, cryptographers, and biologists, along with experts in machine learning, underwater acoustics, and linguistics, recently assembled to decode messages from the deep1. That may sound like the title-card montage for the next “team of international super spies” blockbuster, but no: this is the diverse, interdisciplinary expertise behind the … Continue reading Eavesdropping on Sperm Whales: The Cetacean Translation Initiative