West Virginia University was awarded close to $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for three scientific research projects.
West Virginia University (WVU) was awarded close to $2.6 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for three scientific research projects.
The majority of the money – $2 million – will go towards a physics research project into two-photon imaging, including through upgrading existing imaging facilities. The technology has neuroscience applications, as the high-resolution imaging from two-photon microscopes allows researchers to study complex motor-to-sensory circuits and how they interact.
A helium recovery system will receive $300,000, and when built, it will capture, recycle and reuse helium. The helium will support research in chemistry, biology and nuclear magnetic resonance.
The remaining $300,000 will fund a project to investigate the role of new quantum materials in technological advancements, including artificial intelligence and interdisciplinary fields that bridge materials and data science.
On this West Virginia Morning, Gov. Jim Justice called the legislature into special session Sunday afternoon, and News Director Eric Douglas speaks with WVU researchers about their work to analyze duct tape and make it even stronger evidence in court.
On this West Virginia Morning, Gov. Jim Justice called the legislature into special session Sunday afternoon to address the state’s corrections employment crisis, to help fund first responders and to clarify the vehicle tax rebate. Those are just 3 of 44 items on the governor’s call and Randy Yohe has our story.
News Director Eric Douglas spoke with Tatiana Trejos, an associate professor at the WVU Department of Forensic and investigative sciences to find out more about their work to analyze duct tape and make it even stronger evidence in court.
Also, Curtis Tate has the story of a transgender student in Harrison County that can continue to participate on her school’s track team after a federal court ruling, and Randy Yohe reports on a West Virginia communications workers union has agreed not to strike and continue contract negotiations.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Concord University and Shepherd University.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
For most of us, we turn on the water faucet and clean water comes out. But we may not realize the water pipes that deliver the water to our homes have a micro slime inside them.
For most of us, we turn on the water faucet and clean water comes out. But we may not realize the water pipes that deliver the water to our homes have a micro slime inside them.
WVU professor and researcher Emily Garner has a grant from the National Science Foundation to look into micro-organisms in water systems. She spoke with News Director Eric Douglas to explain what she is finding.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: First off, introduce yourself and explain who you are.
Garner: My name is Emily Garner. I’m an assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at West Virginia University. I’ve been in that position for four years and I study the role of microorganisms and engineered systems for the treatment and transport of drinking water and wastewater.
Douglas: Let’s talk for just a second about what it takes to deliver water from the treatment plant to your house.
Garner: When drinking water leaves the treatment plant, it still has a really long journey to travel before it arrives at your home or the businesses in your community. It can take days or even weeks for the water to make that journey. It’s one of the biggest jobs that our water utilities have – is making sure that that water stays high quality and safe for people to drink from the time it leaves the treatment plant to the time when it arrives at people’s homes. Even a relatively small community might have hundreds of miles of pipe that are buried underground.
Douglas: That’s, that’s actually kind of stunning. I would never have thought it would be in the system that long. Is it going to a holding tank somewhere?
Garner: Certainly tanks are really prevalent throughout distribution systems, especially in West Virginia, where we’ve got a lot of hills. They can help us overcome some of the elevation differences that might exist throughout a community. Those things are also really important for holding water so the treatment plant can treat the same amount of water throughout the day and night and not need to kind of adjust to the fact that everyone wakes up at 6am and takes a shower. But water doesn’t usually sit in those tanks for days or weeks at a time. It’s just that when water has to travel through hundreds of miles of pipe, it can take a really long time. That time just starts to add up.
Douglas: Explain to me what biofilms are within the water distribution system.
Garner: It’s very normal in any aquatic environment. If you’ve gone down to the river or the stream, you might see kind of a film that forms on the surface of rocks. That’s exactly what we’re talking about in drinking water. But of course, the water is much cleaner. When that water leaves the treatment plant, the utility has dosed some sort of chlorine disinfectant to kill harmful microorganisms. But there’s lots of research out there that shows that there still might be some microorganisms present in that water. Most of those are going to be harmless, they’re not going to make people sick but as that water flows over the surface of pipes continuously, it can lead to formation of those biofilms.
We care about those for a number of different reasons. When they accumulate in great enough quantities, they can affect water quality in different ways like compounds that affect taste and odor. They could slough off into the water and lead to discoloration events. Really importantly, they can also create environments where harmful bacteria do get into the system. While these biofilms are totally normal, in small quantities, it is really important to have strategies to control them and to make sure they don’t get out of hand and start to accumulate in ways that can affect water quality.
Douglas: You’re not talking like big green slimy build up inside of a water pipe. This is a microscopic level, typically.
Garner: We’re talking about these really, really thin biofilms. But when they accumulate on the inside of many, many miles of pipe, it can still be something that can affect water quality.
Douglas: InWest Virginia, especially in the rural areas, some of the smaller communities, there’s some aging infrastructure, there’s aging water systems. So what do we do about some of that? Is that a growing problem?
Garner: Certainly our infrastructure is aging across the country, but certainly in a lot of parts of West Virginia. I think it’s important to be really concerned about the state of that buried infrastructure that we can’t see that was maybe put in the ground 50, 60 plus years ago. And so that’s absolutely an important thing to be concerned with, and making sure that we can minimize some of these impacts to water quality.
Douglas: Is chlorine what we’re using and it just works best beyond anything?
Garner: It’s a balancing act. Chlorine is really, really important. You know, it wasn’t much more than 100 years ago that we had diseases like cholera that were affecting huge swaths of the population because we weren’t able to disinfect our water before we drank it. So chlorine is absolutely essential, making sure we can disinfect that water is absolutely essential.
But today, we do know that it can react with other compounds in water, like organic matter, to create compounds known as disinfection byproducts. A lot of these disinfection byproducts are possible carcinogens. And so we certainly want to minimize how prevalent those are in our water. It’s a really big balancing act for water utilities to deal with: how do they make sure there’s enough chlorine present in our water to kill microorganisms, while making sure that they don’t contribute to the propagation of these disinfection byproducts? And that’s one of the reasons we really care about control of biofilms. Because organic matter can accumulate in those biofilms — microorganisms are organic, they create organic compounds, to help them kind of stick to the walls of the pipe. And so controlling biofilms are also important to help make that balancing act a little bit easier.
Douglas: One of the big issues facing the water community is people who can work in these systems, who have a lot of these water facilities, are aging out or they’re retiring. Talk to me a little bit about what you’re doing to help get people who can work in the water systems?
Garner: This grant from the National Science Foundation that is supporting a lot of my work, it has two major goals. One is research, and the other is education. That education includes things like, I plan to work with a lot of undergraduate and graduate students so they will come out of this better trained to engineer good systems, designing good systems that can address some of these challenges that we’re talking about.
But the other part of my education component associated with this grant is through K through 12 outreach. My goal is to help K through 12 students better understand what opportunities they might have for careers in the water sector. I want them to, you know, decide whether or not they want to pursue careers in that field, how important water workers in our state are for the health of our communities.
Douglas: What haven’t we talked about?
Garner: I did want to mention that for this National Science Foundation project, one of our main goals for this research is to better integrate our understanding of the microbiology of drinking water systems with modeling of flow patterns present in drinking water distribution systems. With lots of other aquatic environments, we know that the forces that are exerted by flowing water can impact how biofilms grow, but we don’t really have a thorough understanding of how flow impacts what happens to microorganisms in drinking water distribution systems. And part of why this is so important, and interesting to my research team, is that one of our key hypotheses driving this research is that we think these conditions will be very different in rural areas where it can take many, many miles of pipe to reach even a relatively few number of homes in a small community compared to much more densely populated urban areas where we’ve got a lot more data on this subject.
That’s what one of our goals is, to better understand what some of the challenges that might exist to integrating flow modeling of distribution systems with understanding microbiology especially in rural communities.
With Thanksgiving just around the corner, a West Virginia University researcher is looking into the apparent decline of wild turkeys in several states.
With Thanksgiving just around the corner, a West Virginia University researcher is looking into the apparent decline of wild turkeys in several states.
Unlike the farm-raised fowl that grace holiday tables across America, wildlife conservationists say wild turkey populations are declining.
With funding from hunting advocacy organization National Wild Turkey Federation, West Virginia University Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology Chris Rota will study wild turkey populations in South Dakota. He will use radio transmitters placed on turkeys to better understand their movements and nesting locations.
“Turkey populations are strongly driven primarily by hen survival, and secondarily by reproduction,” he said. “Some of the big factors that might be limiting the population could be predation of adult females. It could be hunter harvest of adult females, and that’s something that we can change via management. But reproduction can also be a part of this as well making sure that there’s appropriate nesting habitat to produce young.”
Rota points out that protecting potential turkey habitats will have a broader reaching impact beyond helping hunters.
“We are protecting that habitat for a whole suite of other critters that are going to use that habitat as well,” he said. “When people enjoy going to wildlife management areas, maybe to hike or to view wildlife, they’re looking at a whole suite of species, even if that habitat was set aside for hunters.”
Rota said hunters drive conservation efforts because the fees they pay, from excise taxes on firearms to hunting licenses, fund wildlife conservation efforts.
“Hunters for a century or more have been really integral in the conservation, not just of our iconic big game species, like turkey or white tailed deer, but also in conservation of myriad species,” he said.
Reversing downward trends is important because turkeys play an important ecological role as prey, but also a societal role as part of many Native American food and cultural systems.
A team at West Virginia University is studying how exposure to toxic substances from military burn pits affect veterans’ health.
In August, Congress passed the Honoring our PACT Act, intended to significantly improve healthcare access and funding for veterans who were exposed to toxic substances during military service. A team at West Virginia University is studying how exposure to toxic substances from military burn pits affect veterans’ health.
Inside the West Virginia University Inhalation Facility lab, senior research engineer Travis Goldsmith prepares a modified pellet stove for an experiment.
“We kind of ripped out the guts of it and kind of made it our own,” he said. “We added a lot of different sensors, thermocouples live in different temperatures, we got a jet fuel line hose we can drip that on one we have the auger we control the speed of the auger we control the speed of the fan.”
Goldsmith and his colleagues are studying the potential health impacts of burn pits, an incineration method used by the U.S. military to manage waste on foreign bases. Since the WVU team can’t go out back and build their own burn pit, the finite control the pellet stove offers them is key to managing the compounding variables of a real-world burn pit. Temperature of burn, distance from the source, and the materials burned, are just a few examples.
As the stove turns on, pellets meant to mimic burn pit components are automatically fed into the stove.
“We’re going to start with rubber, plastics, Styrofoam, cardboard, and just regular wood chips and sawdust. Basically like I said, try to mimic what happens at the actual burn pit,” Goldsmith said.
According to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, open-air combustion of trash and other waste in burn pits was a common practice in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other areas of the Southwest Asia theater of military operations. The Department of Defense has now closed out most burn pits and is planning to close the remainder.
Timothy Nurkiewicz is the chair of West Virginia University’s Department of Physiology and Pharmacology as well as the director of the Inhalation Facility.
“The line I like to use is that military bases are not like camping. In camping, what you pack in, you pack out and leave nothing behind. At a military base, what they pack in, when they’re done, everything is destroyed. And that’s achieved by burning it in a burn pit,“ Nurkiewicz said. “It ranges from simple things like paper, and wood, to more complex things like styrofoam and rubber fluids like hydraulic fluid, paint, coatings, batteries, computers, human waste, as well as surgical waste, there’s essentially no limit to it.”
When veterans started returning from the 1991 Gulf War, many began presenting with chronic, unexplained symptoms like fatigue, muscle pain, and cognitive issues. Theories as to the illness’s source ranged from vaccines to exposure to depleted uranium.
“They are over the years presenting now with what is referred to as Chronic Multisymptom Illness,” Nurkiewicz said.
Chris Schulz
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Senior research engineer Travis Goldsmith presents filters before and after they are exposed to the exhaust of the laboratory’s modified pellet stove.
Instances of Chronic Multisymptom Illness, or CMI, have only increased with the U.S. military’s continued presence in the Middle East, but often it takes months or years for symptoms to present in veterans. The disease is not well understood, but a leading theory now is that the broad health impacts are caused by exposure to burn pit exhausts.
“That is first and foremost in our research, is to identify what is that lag between exposure and ultimate effect that a person is aware that there is something wrong,” Nurkiewicz said.
Burn pit emissions often wafted across a base or outpost, and therefore the potential toxicants from the burn impact every soldier and service member on the base, regardless of whether they worked directly on the pit or not.
“We haven’t even started considering things like skin exposures, or ocular exposures, or secondhand exposures, the emissions that land on solid surfaces, and then people will touch that surface and later on their hands will go into their mouth, their nose, their eyes, their ears,” Nurkiewicz said. “The lungs are our focus right now, because it is the most reasonable place to start. But there should be studies looking at these alternate routes of exposure.”
Research scientist Anand Ranpara is analyzing the soot and smoke created by the lab’s pellet stove to get a better understanding of its composition and impact on the lungs. He says they have found compounds like naphthalene and benzene at nanoscopic scales, meaning the tiny particles can easily bypass the lungs’ defense mechanisms and enter the bloodstream. They have also identified toxic gasses such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides in their experiments.
“We are not talking about only one or two impacts, it’s not one plus one is two, it could be more than two. So you have particles, and you have gasses, both are gonna cause the health impact,” Ranpara said. “And it could be exponential. And that’s exactly what our working hypothesis is building up to. That’s why we are seeing some long term health impacts, not short term immediate effects of health among veterans.”
The team’s work is ongoing, and Nurkiewicz is asking for the help of veterans to better understand the issue.
“We are not veterans. Our study inception in design is based on what we have learned from members of the West Virginia National Guard, and from the literature, but that by no means is conclusive of all of the burn pits, and all of the things that some of our soldiers may have seen,” Nurkiewicz said. “So in that capacity, we would like to ask anyone who may want to contribute to the project, please reach out to us with your information. However small you may think it is, it’s something that we don’t know. And we need your input.”
Timothy Nurkiewicz can be contacted at tnurkiewicz@hsc.wvu.edu
A large federal grant will help researchers at West Virginia University understand vision problems.
A large federal grant will help researchers at West Virginia University understand vision problems.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded West Virginia University an $11 million Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant for a visual sciences research center.
The funding will help WVU recruit researchers and clinician-scientists who will work together to develop innovative ways to prevent, treat and slow the progression of vision problems and blinding eye disease that are currently incurable.
West Virginia has one of the highest rates of visual disability in the U.S. The CDC estimates four percent of West Virginians live with blindness or severe difficulty seeing even with glasses.
In a press release from WVU, the principal COBRE investigator Visvanathan Ramamurthy said the center’s research could have implications across—and beyond—West Virginia.
