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Show Page 6 AggieLife Monday, April 2, 2012 Perfect Partner Let us help plan your big day Your Best Choice for Wedding Invitations & paper goods ii _N Jwff SQUARE ON ■PFar PRINTING 630 West 200 North 753-8875 SUPER CARE FOR SUPER STUDENTS! College is a place where students better themselves, where they discover their true self and occasionally...where they do really STUPID STUFF. ..4•1,•.1 • • USU STUDENTS HAVE HONED THEIR interests to create research projects that will support their graduate studies. Horticulture student Tiffany Maughan said a recent research project helped refine her study interests. File photo •.1 Graduate students find solutions in research BY NADIAH JOHARI staff writer At Cache Valley Hospital, we offer 24/7 Emergency Care for all of your super falls, super fails and super temporary lapses in judgment. When Tiffany Maughan was in third grade, her teacher showed a video about orange tree grafting in one of her classes. That day, Maughan said, her love of horticulture was sparked. "Probably everybody else in that class didn't care, but when I saw that you could cut something off a tree and put it onto another tree and it would keep growing and keep producing fruit, it was fascinating to me and I had to find out more," said Maughan, a senior majoring in horticulture. She's been researching how to optimize planting Or, perhaps you have found someone to share a meal with? Now celebrate with a diamond from S.E. Needham Jewelers. S.E. Needham jewelers since 1896 141 North Main • www.seneedham.com • 435-752-7149 dates for strawberries in high-tunnel production. Maughan said a high tunnel is a structure that looks like a greenhouse except it's made of plastic and PVC pipe — no heating is used, either. She said since the growing season in Logan is short, high tunnels can extend the season to almost year round, except during the coldest part of winter. As a result, there is an increase in profits for people who produce for farmers' markets, she said. Maughan also said strawberries in high tunnels are produced one month sooner than strawberries grown in fields, therefore local farmers' markets can sell these strawberries at higher prices. "I sell my strawberries at an average of $4 a pound, which seems really high since at the grocery store you can normally get them at $1.50 a pound," Maughan said. "But because they're fresh, local and taste great, they're grown all the way to their ripeness — people are willing to pay that. You can recoup the extra cost that you put into the high tunnel pretty quickly by being able to charge more." Brady DeHart was inspired to do research on video games after observing his younger siblings playing "World of Warcraft" 30 hours per week, said DeHart, who recently graduated with a degree in psychology and soon begin his doctorate in experimental psychology at USU in the fall. While doing his research, DeHart said he stumbled across a theory, called selfdetermination theory, which lists three basic motivations or needs. He also said better psychological health results when those needs are fulfilled. According to research, online video games have the capacity to fulfill those needs, he said. However, DeHart said, he found a contradiction in research done by others about video games. He said some research shows that people who spend a lot of time playing video games have poor psychological health. Since he was curious about this contradiction, DeHart said he recruited a group of students who played online video games and another group of students who did not play these games and compared their need fulfillment and how well that predicted psychological health, he said. DeHart said he found he found no difference in need fulfillment between the groups. "Video games on the surface appear to fulfill intrinsic needs," he said. "However, fulfillment through video games does not predict psychological health like it should." He said his research challenges the self-determination theory, which has been around for 30 years. He has now completed the project and will be submitting his research for publication, he said. Although he faced some problems, such as juggling time between other school work and research, his love for science and research motivates him to overcome these challenges, Dehart said. Lance Seefeldt, professor at the department of chemistry and biochemistry and this year's D. Wynne Thorne Career Research Award winner, said he's been interested in how living systems manage energy for 20 years. Although one of the key elements that living systems need to live is nitrogen, it is a limiting element in most environments, he said. "We don't think about it as much in this Western part of the world, because we get sufficient nitrogen in the form of protein that we're eating," he said. "But for most humans and for most other living organisms, nitrogen is a limitation. We're trying to understand the process by which living systems get their hands on nitrogen." Seefeldt said this project brings together a powerful team of scientists from Virginia Tech University, Northwestern University and USU. David F. Lancy, emeritus professor of anthropology, is this year's speaker for the D. Wynne Thorne Lecture during Research Week. He was also the 2011 D. Wynne Thorne Career Research Award winner. Lancy said he' didn't become excited about school as an undergraduate until he did his own research on Siamese fighting fish, which he eventually got published. He said he started out as a psychology major at the University of California, Irvine, before he went to Liberia to work on a research project. His research involved comparing children's cognitive development, he said. "In the process, I got very interested in how culture influences children's development," he said. "So my focus in graduate studies shifted to anthropology." Lancy's current research focuses on finding a common pattern among various considerations of infants in different cultures. "In most societies, infants are not considered fully human for a variety of reasons, and we are looking into what makes them human and what is the process of becoming a human being," he said. "Also, if they are not human beings, what are they? How is the baby perceived — as a spirit, as a reincarnated ancestor?" Lancy, who recently attended the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, in Ogden, said he was impressed by conversations he overheard regarding research among undergraduates. "They were just like the conversations that 'big guys' have at conferences," he said. "It was the same intense discussions over findings. Just think of how they will be going forward." - nadiah.johari@aggiemail.usu.edu |