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The LiucciCastTrevor Knight, Stephen McGee & Liucci look ahead to A&M's trip to South CarolinaFormer A&M quarterbacks Trevor Knight and Stephen McGee join Billy to preview Saturday's matchup with the Gamecocks, including the challenge of facing a Muschamp defense and Kellen's effort to go 4-0 against South Carolina.2020-11-0637 min
Exploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Using Physics to Increase Energy Efficiency of LEDsYou may know semiconductors from computers: they’re a material somewhere between an electrical conductor and an electrical insulator that can be used as an extremely fast switch. However, semiconductors are also what we have to thank for the revolution in energy-efficient LED lighting technology. “One of them is gallium nitride. The reason it's a good light bulb is, if you can excite an electron, say, with applying a voltage, then when it de-excites, it emits a photon. And these are the photons that make it a good light bulb.” Kathy Kash is professor of physics at Case Western Reserve Univer...2020-01-0901 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: The Evolving Role of a Biostatistician"There are technologies that we can use now like next generation sequencing where it allows us to take a really teeny tiny piece of DNA or RNA and generate thousands if not millions of measurements. And then we sort of look at each other like, now what do we do?" Jill Barnholtz-Sloan is a biostatistician and professor in Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine. She’s using statistics and math to help researchers untangle risk factors and survival factors for different types of brain tumors. "There's lots of different ways that you can study a disease in a popu...2020-01-0201 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Understanding a New Theory of Gravity“It's known that the universe is expanding; of course it's been known since the 1920s. The surprise we were hit with in the 1990s is that the expansion is accelerating, and so it's a big mystery, what causes that to happen,” Harsh Mathur said. Mathur is a professor of Physics at Case Western Reserve University, and he’s exploring the mathematics that could explain how the universe accelerates as it expands. “It's quite challenging, you know, because Einstein's equations work so well in the solar system, so how do you modify them without damaging the fact that they work in the sola...2019-12-2601 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Mathematically Modeling Fish MigrationThe fishermen of Iceland became concerned around a decade ago. The capelin, a small fish that’s a staple catch, and a crucial link in the ocean ecosystem, stopped migrating like they used to. To whom did they turn? A team of mathematicians. “So what I think about is particles but each particle gets to make decisions. And it makes decisions based on what the particles around it are doing," Dr. Alethea Barbaro said. Barbaro is a mathematician at Case Western Reserve University. "So I think about where a particle is, where it wants to go, then I move it ther...2019-12-1901 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: A New Way to Search for Extraterrestrial IntelligenceSome of you may have heard of SETI: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The idea is that if there's an advanced alien civilization, they’d try to contact us using radio. So we should look for radio signals from space that look like messages. "In the 21 st century, if you ask how do we communicate the most efficient amount of information over the longest distances, the answer is not radio, it’s fiber optics and optical and infrared signals that are going through cables," said Corbin Covault, professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. "And indeed if you could have...2019-11-2801 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Making Robotic Limbs More HumanA research group at Case Western Reserve University, led by professor of biomedical engineering Dustin Tyler, works with neural implants in people who’ve lost limbs to restore not only motion with prosthetics, but also the sense of touch. "We spent a lot of time understanding how our language, the electrical language, is translated into the human perception, predominantly in terms of sense of touch," Tyler said. "The first time we went in with our subject, we had no idea what was going to happen. So we first turned on the first stimulus pulses and he said, 'Wow, that's my th...2019-11-2101 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Studying Early Earth to Unlock Secrets of Astro-Biology"If we find life on another planet, it's likely going to be microbial," said Ashley Manning-Berg, assistant professor in geology at The University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. "So a lot of the focus for evidence for life is not just to learn about the ecosystems on early Earth, it's a way of telling us that if life evolved and then died on Mars, what do we look for? Manning-Berg is studying how billion-year-old fossils of microorganisms were preserved on Earth, so we can know what to look for on other planets. “So if you have a microfossil that is torn an...2019-11-1501 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Discovering Epilepsy Before the First SeizureEpilepsy is a condition that we usually think of as being in the brain. Doctors typically identify it by measuring brain activity. However, new evidence has emerged showing that the brain may not be the only place we can see epilepsy. Roberto Galan is an adjunct associate professor of electrical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. “When I investigated the electrocardiograms - the electrical activity of the heart - in patients with epilepsy, and in control patients, I found significant differences in the rhythm that the heart displays," Galan said. By analyzing the EKGs of people with epilepsy, he found th...2019-11-0101 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Scientists Study Mystery Particles at Argentine ObservatoryIn the early 20 th century, physicists discovered cosmic rays- energetic particles zooming through deep space. Many of these come from the sun, and can cause the northern lights. However, a few, very mysteriously, come from somewhere else with enormous energy. “The real puzzle is no one has any idea what in the universe is capable of doing that," said Corbin Covault, professor of physics at Case Western Reserve University. "There's some ideas, like massive black holes sucking material down in the middle of galaxies, but when they do the calculations it's really, really not obvious.” To investigate the origin of thes...2019-10-2501 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: The Biggest Parasitic Disease You've Never Heard OfThe schistosome worm causes schistosomiasis, which just might be the biggest parasitic disease you’ve never heard of. “You get it walking in water that's infected with infectious snails,” said Emmitt Jolly, associate professor of biology at Case Western Reserve University. “There are almost 240 million people infected with schistosomes, and about 300,000 people are dying.” Jolly is unravelling the genetics of the schistosome to find ways to attack it with drugs. Step one is to figure out which genes do what. “Our lab developed over-expression technology in schistosomes. You put in a gene, and over-express that gene,” Jolly said. “Whatever targets that that gene n...2019-10-1801 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: A French Connection Unearthed in Millstones“Cultural geology in my eye is the interface of geology and human culture,” Joe Hannibal said. Joe Hannibal is curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History . He’s a fossil expert, but he’s also used his fossil and rock identification skills to track the movements of cultural materials. "When the Euro-Americans came into different parts of the country, they would first establish mills. Well, a lot of those mills have then burned down,” Hannibal said. "But millstones, well, they're made out of stone." Hannibal was examining some historic millstones in Ohio when he noticed they contained...2019-10-1001 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: New Discoveries in Treating Sleep ApneaWhen we think about it, we usually remember to breathe when we’re awake. But who’s at the controls when we’re sleeping? “We’re still continuing to understand the coupling between the neural control in the brain stem and the controlled system, which is the nasal pharynx and oral pharynx and the position of the tongue," said Kingman Strohl, professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at Case Western Reserve University . He’s interested in how the brain’s breathing control system can go awry, leading to blockages or pauses in our breathing, called apneas, that can wake us up. They keep...2019-10-0301 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: The Importance of Understanding How Cells Take Out the TrashTo live and function, we know cells have to eat and reproduce. But, they also have to take out the trash. What seems like a simple chore to us is actually a matter of life or death for the cell, and drug designers are finding this useful in the fight against disease. “If you have, let's say, something toxic to the cell, the cell tries to eliminate that toxin by encapsulating it and getting rid of it,” said Dr. Jürgen Bosch . Cells form fatty acid bubbles around their garbage using a protein called ATG8. ATG8 has to connect, lock-and-key, with...2019-09-2601 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Using Math to Better Understand Cancer CellsMathematics and biology sound like pretty distant relatives, but for Wanda Strychalski, an assistant professor of mathematics at Case Western Reserve University, they’re a perfect match. “I really see mathematical biology - or mathematics, as another tool or assay for lab scientists to use to try and understand really complicated data," Strychalski said. Strychalski has been developing mathematical simulations to learn how cells, especially cancer cells, migrate around your body by flexing their stiff internal structure, called a cytoskeleton, which pushes and pulls the cell’s membrane, the barrier between the cell and the outside world. “So as it’s migratin...2019-09-1901 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Solving the Mystery of MalariaHumans have had to live with malaria for a long time. So long, in fact, that we even see changes in our genome that protect us from the disease. "Sickle cell anemia probably emerged in human populations approximately ten to twelve thousand years ago. And this occurred coincidental with the change in lifestyle and agricultural settlements. So there was enough population densities of people that mix with population densities of mosquitos," Jim Kazura said. Two copies of the sickle cell gene give you malformed blood cells, or sickle cell anemia. But, one copy of the gene makes your blood cells...2019-09-1201 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: What Causes Spontaneous Activity in the BrainIt seems our brains are never truly quiet. We dream when we are asleep, and in sensory deprivation experiments, participants start hallucinating within 15 minutes. Where does this spontaneous activity in our brains come from? "My contention is, based on experiments and computational models, that spontaneous activity is triggered by what is called 'noise,'" said Roberto Galan. Galan is an adjunct associate professor in electrical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. He studies how our brains - unlike electronic devices - work with internal noise, and how that noise may lead to the brain’s spontaneous activity. "The sources of th...2019-09-0601 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: A Super-Cooled Glimpse into the Quantum WorldWhen we cool things down, classically, we can think of the atoms moving around inside the material getting slower and slower until they stop moving. That should make really cold things really boring, right? “ Supercool liquid helium crawls out of containers," Nandini Trivedi said. "And certain supercool metals lose all their resistance. So as substances get cold they start behaving in really unusual ways. ” Trivedi is professor of physics at Ohio State University. Her specialty is the theory of quantum matter: figuring out how these weird effects, like superfluidic liquid helium flowing up out of its container, or superconductors losing thei...2019-02-2801 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Lucy's Ancient Cousin Ardi“ People always want to know where they came from, right? They get excited by new discoveries of dinosaurs, but they become curious by the discovery of early human fossils. ” Yohannes Haile-Selassie is a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and is a paleoanthropologist studying human evolution. As a graduate student in 1994, he was part of a group searching for fossils in Ethiopia’s Middle Awash region, and found a small, delicate fragment of a hand bone. This fragment lead to the discovery of a 4.4 million-year-old skeleton that would change the earlier chapters of human origins. “ Ardipithecus ramidus is the spec...2019-02-2101 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: The Birth of Cancer ImmunotherapyEach time our cells grow and divide, they have to perfectly copy out almost a billion elements of genetic code. Of course, perfect almost never happens. So as soon as there was a genetic code, life had to evolve a way to fix DNA mismatches. But sometimes people inherit mutations in those DNA mismatch repair genes, and then you have really challenging cancers. But, at the bottom of this, there lies some hope in our own immune systems. “Very recently, we realized that those cancers have a ton of mutations in them,” said Stan Gerson , distinguished professor and the Director of t...2019-02-1401 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: How Modern Cells CommunicateIn order to function, the cells in our bodies need to coordinate and pass information, say, if we need a burst of energy to flee a threat. But, without eyes, ears, or even radios, how do they signal this information reliably? “The only way to communicate, and this is actually a big challenge for biology, is by basically sending out groups of molecules which then can interact with other molecules," said Professor Mike Hinczewski, a biophysicist at Case Western Reserve University . "There’s going to be lots of noise, and so biology has to figure out a way of compensating for...2019-02-0701 minExploradio OriginsExploradio Origins: Echoes of Colliding Neutron StarsScientists have spent centuries studying how matter works. They’ve boiled it, they’ve frozen it, and they’ve even thrown it into particle colliders and smashed it up. They’ve learned a lot about what matter does in these conditions, but--that’s just what we can do on Earth.2019-01-3101 min