Research Story
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One PhD Candidate’s Path to BYU
PhD candidate Ashari Kannangara came to BYU from Sri Lanka to study how to make chemotherapy more effective. “I have seen a lot of people go through the pain of cancer,” she said. One of those was her uncle, who battled bladder cancer for several years. She witnessed not only her uncle’s suffering, but also how “their family went through this miserable pain.”
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A Forgotten Relic Holds Clues to the Future
In 1975, the fossilized remains of a 35-ft mosasaur, the Prognathadon stadtmani, were discovered by fifteen-year-old Gary L. Thompson* near Delta, Colorado. These remains were excavated by a team of paleontologists from BYU soon after and have been kept in the stores of BYU’s Museum of Paleontology for decades.
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Speed Diagnosis for Sepsis
The current methods for detecting bacterial infection in the blood and whether those bacteria are resistant to common antibiotics can sometimes take an entire day—which is more time than a patient with sepsis can afford.
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Playing with Swarms
Hearing Dr. Michael Goodrich talk about his research in human-robot interaction, you might not realize that he works at all.
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Chevron Phillips Chemical teams up with BYU researchers to speed up catalyst development
Chemical companies are currently racing to develop new catalysts that efficiently produce key commodity chemicals used in the manufacture of plastics. Dr. Daniel Ess and his graduate students developed a computer model to identify new catalysts. Read more about it at BYU News.
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Understanding Autism – Shannon Tass
When Professor Shannon Tass was a graduate student she focused her statistics research on cancer. Why? Because she wanted to make a difference.
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BYU team wins $250,000 grant in Amazon Alexa Challenge
Learn about Eve (short for Emotive Adversarial Ensembles), a socialbot run on the Alexa platform and created by a team of ten BYU computer science students
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The extraordinary geological adventures of Hannah Bonner
Bonner’s experiences illustrate why BYU ranks fifth in the country for graduates who go on to earn a Ph.D. Read about her journey on BYU News.
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How Three Numbers Can Save 130,000 Lives
The Indian Ocean tsunami that rocked Indonesia on December 26, 2004, shook the ground beneath the locals’ feet for eight whole minutes. Thirteen years later, Dr. Ron Harris is still shaken.
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Want Safe Travels? Find Freeways with these Features
New BYU research commissioned by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) shows a number of highway features that make accidents less likely. Among them are some that are intuitive: minimal hills and curves, paved right shoulders and concrete-barrier medians. But one finding was less expected: lower speed limits were associated with higher rates of accidents.
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The Teacher’s Craft: How Japan Fosters Great Teaching Methods
It’s an old story that’s resurrected every few years when an international assessment of math publishes its results: The U.S. students are trounced again by the students from several East Asian countries. Some even dismiss these studies all together after a popular book by Malcolm Gladwell hypothesized that students in other countries score higher simply because they work harder. Country scores on one of the most popular international assessments, the TIMSS, are almost perfectly predicted by a measure of work ethic of a country. The students score higher in East Asian countries because they are taught, and pressured, to work so hard—case closed.
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Microscopic Algae and Massive Landslides: Studying Utah’s Climate Through Geology
Thirteen thousand years ago, Utah got cold–really cold. The last ice age had been over for at least 5,000 years, but after a sudden drop in temperature, the climate—heading towards warmth and dryness—flipped a U-turn. As snow and ice crisscrossed the state, the sudden increase in precipitation triggered a massive eighteen-mile-long train of landslides that altered the natural topography of parts of central Utah.
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Exciting Stars, Exciting Times, Exciting Research
David neilsen and eric hirschmann have spent years studying binary partnerships that are millions, even billions, of light years away in the universe—and those binary partnerships echo their personal partnership, both as friends and as research colleagues.
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BYU Geochemist Plays Detective with Water and Dust
Wind carries a particle of dust from the dry lake bed to the mountain snowpack. The snowpack melts, and the water flows down streams and rivers, through a pipe, and to the tap.
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Researchers Use Wikipedia to Give AI Context Clues
Walk into a room, see a chair, and your brain will tell you that you can sit in it, tip it over or lift it up, but you wouldn’t even consider drinking it, promoting it or unlocking it. As humans, explains BYU computer science professor David Wingate, we know intuitively that certain verbs pair naturally with certain nouns, and we also know that most verbs don’t make sense when paired with random nouns.
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Prom and Pumping Iron Makes Biochemical Research Look Like High School
Managing iron in the body is a lot like chaperoning a high school dance, according to Dr. Richard Watt.
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Why Number Theorists Tackle Centuries-Old Problems
Dr. Roger Baker’s office whiteboard fills up in twenty minutes with centuries-old problems for which no mathematician has an answer or a proof.
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Shaken and Stirred: The Simulation of Sand Stimulation
Dr. Parris Egbert knows sand—really knows sand.
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