It's not about the individual, it's about the community

It’s not about the individual, it’s about the community

By: Eliel Ramirez

It has been over a year since the pandemic locked society in their homes and became enslaved by their 

mask. But with the release of Covid-19 vaccines, people began to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It was not until the unfortunate blood clots that six women received as a side effect of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine occurred that forced them to stop giving out the J&J vaccine. 

Suddenly the emotional long-haul of a pandemic got longer, and people grew weary of the other vaccines in circulation. 

Dr. Chandani Patel, co-owner of Robins Pharmacy alongside her husband Ankit Patel, was able to shed some light on the misinformation going around.

Patel stressed that the vaccine is not about an individual, but about the community and that getting vaccinated was a way to protect everyone.

She also acknowledged that people may fear the vaccine because of how quickly it was released.

“The sequence of the virus was released by the Chinese government when the Wuhan occurred,” Patel said. “So when the Chinese government released this information, there were scientists that had already worked on the coronavirus and were able to recognize the sequence of the virus and was then able to find a vaccine that was fairly quick.”

She said that it did not mean that they skipped any steps in the process. Just that they were lucky the sequence of the virus was recognizable and that scientists were able to find a way to create the vaccine through that.  

Another issue she brought up was people’s fear of getting sick from the vaccine. 

Patel said that she has heard a lot of people say that they got flu-like illnesses, rashes or felt fainty, but she said that all of that is normal with any vaccine such as the flue vaccine, pneumonia vaccine and now the corona vaccine.

It also circled around the Christian community that aborted fetuses have been used to create these vaccines.

“That’s not anything that is true,” Patel said. “Sometimes embryos can be used, but this is not something that is from a live embryo, it’ll be from a stem cell which we use on a daily basis within science and medicine.”

She followed that up by saying there are also not any microchips in the vaccine, because something people think they are going to get tracked.

“You can get 10 doses out of one vile,” she said. “It’ll be nearly impossible to get a microchip in every dose.”

She said that no one is tracking anyone and that we all have phones so if that were to happen it would have already been done.

“I think everyone needs to get vaccinated,” Marisella Arias, volunteer at the walk-in vaccination held at Remanso de Paz church, said. “I understand why people are scared, but it is necessary for us to get through this.”

Many of the people that are scared to get the vaccination are scared due to the vast amount of information that is out there. Patel said that the scientists have tested these vaccines and there is no reason anyone should fear getting vaccinated.

The vaccine gives society hope. Hope of ending this pandemic. The J&J vaccine may have been recalled, but the good news is that there are other vaccines in circulation.

Patel said that the only way for this pandemic to end is for everyone to work together, however that would only happen if people begin to trust the science. 

As patel said, this vaccine is not about an individual, it is about community.

The Effect of Covid-19 on College Education

  The outbreak of the coronavirus has become a major disruption to Georgia Southern, as well as many schools across the country, with most institutions canceling in-person classes and moving to online-only instruction. 

  By fall, many campuses developed plans to merge in-person instruction (with social distancing) and online learning, with varying adjustments of success by institutions. According to NSCL, 44% of institutions developed fully or primarily online instruction, 21% used a hybrid model and 27% offered fully or primarily in-person instruction. 

   In a survey that was constructed with 85 Georgia Southern students, about 85% of respondents said the pandemic had a negative effect on their performance. Another 9% said the pandemic did not affect their performance, and about 5% said the pandemic had a positive influence on their performance. 

  

  The two main factors affecting grades this fall according to the survey, were academic changes and mental health. Students were navigating a changing educational experience, with remote learning and asynchronous courses in many cases, at the same time they are dealing with stress from the personal effects of the pandemic. 

   Biology Grad Student, Shaun Hunter contributed the decline in academic performance to the lack of resources on campus. “Obviously, Georgia Southern has endless resources, but with the pandemic hovering over our heads, everything is so limited,” he said. Shaun believes that every college student has a “go to” resource such as in-person lectures, the Recreational Activity Center, and the library to help them with their studies. Interestingly, nutritionist major, Rockie James had a similar assessment to Shaun regarding the RAC. 

  “New challenges, such as physical activity, social opportunities, and increased learning in times like this can stimulate the production of new cells in the brain,” she said. “A combination of all of those things can improve concentration, help keep the mind focused, and ultimately, boost work productivity and academic success in students.” 

  Stress is a very common theme during this pandemic, which is why we see a declination in academic performance for college students. When stressed, your muscles may tense all around body, it’ll leave you headaches, tightness around your chest, a pounding pulse, and muscle cramps. 

  When feeling like this, it’s difficult to perform the way that you’re capable of in the classroom. Exercising is an effective way to break this cycle. As well as releasing endorphins in the brain, physical activity helps to relax the muscles and relieve tension in the body. Since the body and mind are so closely linked, when your body feels better so, too, will your mind. 

   Andy Macdon, a psychology major relies heavily on the resources that the library provides for him and many students on campus. Henderson Library which normally has unlimited resources available for students tampered down immensely, to provide a safer atmosphere among this pandemic. 

   As of Fall last semester, like every other area on campus, the library implemented restrictions whereas there can only be a limited amount people in the library at a time. They also implemented a new rule where students were allowed to checkout laptops, which seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. 

  “At the time, the library only had 117 laptops available for us which was a very low number,

 considering the number of students we have on campus,” Andy said.“Sometimes the laptops would take a day or two to get to my place, so it was pretty difficult to keep up with my schoolwork.” 

   With the unprecedented unique challenges that Covid-19 presented with schools all around the country, its easy to see why so many students struggled to adapt to these times. With a year of Covid under our belt, and an end in sight, expect to see schools’ transition to their normal ways and a huge increase in academic performance.

Building a Better Battery

By: Roxanne Cortner

Amazon recently announced an idea of drone package delivery that may not be found to be realistic due to the drone’s battery life. Drone batteries will only allow packages to be carried a maximum of five miles before the battery dies and the drone and package fall from the sky. 

Joshua Johnson, a Georgia Southern graduate student and battery researcher, is researching to find a better battery that is more effective for storing energy. Johnson started his research in the eighth grade when he became interested in building a better battery for a science project. He began looking into different types of materials that could be used as elements to store and transfer energy. 

Johnson explained that now he is looking to find an alternative to lithium batteries due to the fact that lithium is a scarce material, inefficient to mine, and have a short lifespan due to their recharge ability. Johnson further explained that his research is based on the idea of finding a more effective and efficient ion for batteries. Johnson’s ideas include the replacement of lithium ions in batteries with sodium, nickel, and hydrogen ions.

Currently, drone and car batteries are made with lithium which is toxic, but inexpensive compared to the previous use of zinc. Zinc was a heavier, more toxic, and more expensive material. Lithium was a better alternative as it was a lighter material, but the process of obtaining lithium is inefficient. Mining lithium for batteries requires the use of 500,000 gallons of water per metric ton of lithium which can be very damaging to the surrounding community and environment. 

Some alternatives are sodium-ion batteries because they are much less damaging to the environment and less expensive due to their abundance along with the ocean's crust. Since sodium is naturally produced, this causes less harm to the environment during the collection process. Sodium is also available worldwide which saves on the production costs it would take to ship it like shipping lithium from other select countries. 

“Fuzzy logic could assist in the prevention of accidents by using advanced programming to solve problems with the batteries as they happen,” Johnson said.

Fuzzy logic, logic based on possibility instead of probability, increases the safety of batteries. If a battery were to malfunction, overcharge, or charge too quickly, then this could result in the battery exploding. With the implementation of fuzzy logic the overall safety of batteries could be increased.

Johnson further stated that finding an alternative for lithium batteries could also increase their overall safety for the public. Due to the ability of lithium batteries being able to be recharged they are reused for an extensive amount of time. Lithium batteries also become more volatile over time. This creates concerns about lithium batteries' safety because the main reason they are used is also their biggest safety hazard.

Current electric-car batteries that use lithium-ion have to be replaced every 7-10 years. If Johnson can develop these theories and determine a better material source for batteries, then this could also make electric cars more efficient. This would allow electric car batteries to last longer than the charges they may hold now which is also beneficial in the move towards a more sustainable future. 

Johnson said that with all of his research if he can’t find a solution, it will become a mathematical issue. A lot of his research is based on the material learned in physics one and physics two classes which he has applied to figure out how these batteries can be more efficient.

Johnson will continue researching and looking for an alternative to these materials until he finds an effective alternative and can get his research to the world. 

The Return of the Black-Footed Ferret

The Return of the Black-Footed Ferret

By: Taylor Dunn

Using preserved cells from a long-dead animal, scientists have managed to successfully clone the rare Black-Footed Ferret in February, which could pave the way for more animal conservation in the future.

The black-footed ferret is a native North American animal and the only native ferret. This milestone is huge as it's the first native endangered species to have been cloned in the United States. 

Meagan Sandhaas, a zoology major with an emphasis on endangered species, said it was exciting to see science making big strides in animal conservation, especially in saving the ones from extinction.

The black-footed ferret, like many endangered animals, once had vast numbers over the west side of America, but as prairie dogs were eliminated by farmers and ranchers, the black-footed ferrets dwindled as their primary prey was being snuffed out. Thought to be extinct by 1970, a ranch dog led scientists to a colony of the rare ferrets in Wyoming.

Those ferrets found were taken in by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Colorado where they underwent a breeding program that found the ferrets reintroduced to eight states in the American West. The success in the program paved the way for cloning the ferret, and the success of the cloned ferret can pave the way for more large-scale animal conservation efforts. 

The cloning process began with taking eggs from a domestic ferret of a related species, in a way to avoid putting the rest of the endangered female black-footed ferrets at risk. Once the eggs were matured, scientists removed the nucleus and genetic material and combined it with the cells of Willa, a long-deceased black-footed ferret from the 1980s. This method of combining cells from a deceased subject and a close relative of the subject has been used in the past with the cloning of the sheep Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

Born in Colorado, the cloned ferret, Elizabeth Ann is healthy so far, continually being monitored by the Ferret Conservation Center. Once she is old and healthy enough, she'll be released back into the wild to hopefully breed more of the rare species.

"Like other cloned animals reintroduced into the wild, {Elizabeth Ann} would be first reintroduced to an outdoor enclosure like the area she would be released to, in order to monitor her progress and make sure she'll be able to hunt and develop the skills necessary to survive on her own. Although she is a clone, she isn't much different than her predecessors," said Phil Ryder, a scientific officer who works with a pet service focused on cloning. 

As this was not the first time an animal has been successfully cloned, it also won't be the last, especially from a long-dead subject. The extinct subject that was used for the black-footed ferret came from a place called the Frozen Zoo, where scientists and animal conservationists keep frozen embryos, DNA, and stem cells for future projects. 

Today, all of the remaining black-footed ferrets are all siblings or first cousins. Now, with the introduction of Elizabeth Ann, this could infuse the future colonies with more genetic diversity and can help these animals reproduce more easily and even become more resilient to diseases.

Intersectionality’s Impact on Marginalized Identities

By: Aniya Hatten 

     Discrimination is something that people experience daily in the United States and it becomes more difficult to navigate when an individual associates with more than one marginalized identity. This notion is known as intersectionality. When different social categories such as race, gender, class, religion or sexuality intersect they have the potential to oppress an individual, causing serious health concerns for the future. 

“When we look at the health outcomes and health behaviors of marginalized communities…” said Jessica Styles, a Ph.D. candidate in the Psychology Program at the University of Georgia. “There is no coincidence that black and brown communities are the ones that are leading in heart disease, strokes and hypertension.”

People of color usually experience more microaggressions around their race because it is more visible during daily interactions rather than one's sexual orientation or gender. So when another identity that is viewed as inferior to society is added to this individual their chances increase to experience more discrimination, especially if they are gender nonconforming. 

“There’s some data that suggest that for LGBT people of color, particularly trans people of color, they stand at the intersection of multiple sources of potential discrimination,” said  Elizabeth Rahilly, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology at Georgia Southern University. “And sometimes there is this tug-of-war about which community they feel safer with or indebted to. Is it the black community, is it the LGBT community, to what do I owe my family, what do I owe the movement?” 

These identity crises usually lead to loads of stress, even feelings of regret, and this has been dated back to the civil rights movement era. Rahilly says during this period, it was very important for African Americans to present a hetero normative family face to combat racism-- so that left LGBT people of color feeling like traders if they came out. These standards and expectations of the gender binary still affect modern-day society and have impacted marginalized communities negatively.

“No matter what we consider in the U.S., we have to consider race. We have to consider the end fact of slavery and I think it's harder to be trans in the south for anyone,” said Baker Rogers, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology at Georgia Southern University. “In trans women of color, we see the highest rates of discrimination and oppression. For trans men, they have to try and fit into this masculine binary stereotype to really receive acknowledgment.” 

Oftentimes in marginalized communities, there is a lack of access to appropriate resources and there are many barriers to overcome to achieve reliable, trustworthy healthcare. According to Styles, these factors can contribute to mental health concerns like anxiety, depression, self-esteem, substance abuse, isolation and social rejection. An individual’s socioeconomic status plays a large role in the extent to which one is able to combat discrimination and deal with the mental repercussions of it.   

“My work is primarily on parents who raise transgender children and one thing I did notice is that most people in my studies are white, middle to upper-class parents who are college-educated,” said Rahilly. “I don’t think that is a coincidence. The parents I interviewed were meeting with superintendents, rewriting school policies, threatening to sue over bathrooms… they were forces to be reckoned with to protect their kids. But you have to be of a certain socioeconomic status and privilege to do that.” 

The fact of the matter is that marginalized groups are not presented with the same opportunities and resources to aid them in their suffering of discrimination. The fact that they suffer from discrimination is bad enough but studies have proven that when their mental health is not being taken care of, it creates stress and a sense of wear and tear on the body from experiencing discrimination over multiple years. It is important to find healthy coping strategies suitable for you that help you cope in an adaptive way and try to find a support system group to help ease the stress.  

Ask-A-Scientist: Dr. Craig Aumack

 https://youtu.be/kHWPva_oSq4 

Henderson Library vs Covid-19

By: Jacob Johnson

In the past year the world has changed a lot due to the pandemic, most of which has been negative changes but there are some good things too, like the technological advancements that have made working and learning remotely, easier. 

In-person meetings have now almost completely been replaced with virtual meetings, giving workers the ability to meet and work from almost anywhere, but this technology has also helped students learn outside of the traditional classroom setting and made it possible for families to safely connect with each other. 

Henderson Library on Georgia Southern's campus was faced with a difficult task a year ago. To create a safe environment for students and faculty to work and study in, but with restrictions in place during the beginning of the pandemic, only a few people were allowed in the library at a time. 

This created the need for the library to implement a system to get their resources into the hands of those who need it. 

Henderson libraries resources go far beyond physical books, in fact they have a large amount of laptops, chromebooks and headphones for students to check out and use, but this became difficult when the university shut down. 

“Students who take advantage of our services, like checking out laptops were negatively impacted when classes went online,” said Jessica Garner, head of interlibrary loans and a task force aimed at making it possible for the library to reopen to students. “Those students without access to a computer were at a disadvantage when we had to shut down.” 

The library created a system that allowed students to request a laptop and have it mailed to their address if they were not near campus, which would give them the technology needed in order to transition to their new online class schedule and help keep the number of students in the library to a minimum. 

Out of 117 laptops that the library has for students to check out, only 22 of them were still available after the initial shutdown of campus and other departments on campus got involved, offering over 600 laptops for students to be able to check out and use, according to an article written by Garner and Logue. 

“We continue to run low on the amount of laptops we have left for students to check out and I have continuously asked for more funding so that we can buy more laptops for students,” said Natilie Logue, assistant head of inter-library loan at Georgia Southern. 

Once the library reopened, only a limited number of students could enter at a time, which created the need for an appointment system. 

Georgia Southern’s access services department worked with the IT department to create an app that allowed students to make an appointment to come to the library or reserve a time to check out equipment, this was eventually merged inside of the LibApps that were already being used to reserve study rooms. 

“I do not have a personal computer at home, so the library being open is extremely important to me,” said Jose Rodriquez, a junior at Georgia Southern. 

The library also used technology to transfer documents that were previously paper forms, into online documents, in order to limit the exposure between workers and students. 

Now that the library is open, other policies have been put in place to ensure proper social distancing, one of which was moving the library's 200 desktop computers so that they are far enough apart to keep students from being too close to each other. 

Additionally, the library has encouraged faculty to have their course materials available in virtual format, which helps keep students and faculty from having to go to the library to get the materials they need. 

In the last year technology has advanced in many ways and when the pandemic first started, one of the main concerns, besides a vaccine, was how educational institutions would be able to effectively teach their students. 

A lot of work went into creating or improving certain technology in order to create a safe and effective learning environment, which the new and improved technology will likely be integrated into education for the foreseeable future.

Ask a Scientist: Dr. Stephen Greiman

By: Tyler Miller

https://youtu.be/JJQ56rz2Pt8

Ask-A-Scientist: Dr. Rami Haddad

Ask-A-Scientist: Dr. John Carroll

By: Jeffrey Riley