Dee Shore
Antiperspirant alters skin’s microbial ecosystem
Wearing antiperspirant or deodorant doesn’t just affect your social life, it substantially changes the microbial life that lives on you. New research from NC State and others finds that antiperspirant and deodorant can significantly influence both the type and quantity of bacterial life found in the human armpit’s “microbiome.”
Crystal clear
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences research related to water spans the basic to the applied. Here, Dr. Flora Meilleur of the Department of Molecular and Structural Biochemistry discusses her fundamental research using crystallography to better understand the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in enzymes and what that could mean for water conservation.
Giant opportunity
Each year during the Super Bowl, the competition on the field is matched closely by the competition among advertisers to create the most original and impressive commercials. And usually the most heart-warming (or tear-inducing) are those commercials featuring the Budweiser Clydesdales. Last summer, NC State University student Bradley Glover essentially got to inhabit that soft-glow pastoral world of the gentle giants in the ads.
Business and Busy-ness
Andy VonCanon and Brittany Whitmire call their family farm near Brevard “Busy Bee” – and what a fitting name it is. The two keep bees and raise cattle, turkeys and forage crops, all the while holding busy off-farm careers in agriculture. He’s a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences alumnus who teaches high school agriculture, and she’s the new dairy economist with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service at NC State.
High-Order Thinking
With help from a CALS scientist, students from one of the most underserved counties in the state will operate a biotech company right out of their high-school lab.
Important implications: CALS team studies the distinct inflorescence structure of the dogwood
Dr. Bob Franks of NC State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has a bone to pick with those who determined that the dogwood is the state flower of North Carolina. “It actually should be called the ‘state inflorescence,’” Franks, associate professor of plant and microbial biology, said with a laugh. And Franks would know, having spent the past five years working on a National Science Foundation-funded grant to study the inflorescence architecture, or variation in the arrangement of flowers, of the dogwood.