Forget the No. 2 pencil, UMass students took this final exam with a spoon -- mouthful after mouthful of delicious ice cream. Welcome to the University of Massachusetts Amherst's "scooperbowl", where teams of food sciences majors, mostly seniors set to graduate in a few weeks, submit the flavors they have developed all semester as part of assistant professor Sam Nugen's food science class to a panel of experts and to an assembled throng of hungry students. (April 30, 2015, MassLive)
News from the Media
UMass Amherst students win ice cream flavor contest with 'Cherry Bomb'
April 30, 2015
‘No smoking gun’: Pipeline environmental impact report cite positives, negatives of route
April 22, 2015
A new, detailed report on the proposed Tennessee Gas Pipeline route through western Massachusetts points to its impact on protected open space dedicated to agriculture and conservation, and especially on Franklin County’s primary habitat for rare species habitat, wetlands wildlife habitat and communities of biodiversity. (4/22/15 The Recorder; 5/13/15 Hampshire Gazette)
It’s tick time: Stephen Rich, UMass professor offers advice
April 28, 2015
Northampton, MA--Spring has sprung, baseball season’s first pitch has been thrown, April’s rains have been falling, and the ticks are back. Even if you can’t see them. Just ask Michael Noonan of Florence. On a Thursday, a couple of weeks ago, Noonan, 62, noticed a red spot the size of a half dollar on the inside of his elbow, with a small dot in the center. The dot was a deer tick. His wife removed it with a pair of tweezers.
“It looked like a little piece of wood,” Noonan said, “except it was moving.” His arm had been hurting all week — since cleaning up leaves in his driveway on Sunday — but Noonan figured he had a spider bite and didn’t think much of it until his wife did some online research. (4/27/15 Hampshire Gazette)
Downtown Springfield features urban designs created by UMass students
April 23, 2015
SPRINGFIELD, Mass — Every day pedestrians, drivers and bike and bus riders cruise through downtown Springfield often overlooking abandoned buildings or small side streets, each with a story to tell.
Students from the University of Massachusetts Graduate Urban Design Studio have staged six installations throughout downtown Springfield all using tactical urbanism, an emergent form of urban design that looks at new ways to enliven cities with temporary interventions that are inexpensive and easy to install, according to Frank Sleegers and Michael Di Pasquale, urban design professors at University of Massachusetts Amherst. (The Reminder, MassLive 4/23/15)
UMass Amherst Food Scientist Wins National Award, Fellowships
April 16, 2015
AMHERST, Mass. – David Julian McClements, professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an internationally recognized expert in the encapsulation and delivery of bioactive components, recently was honored with the Institute of Food Technologies (IFT) Babcock-Hart Award for contributions to food technology that result in improved public health through nutrition. (4/16/2015 News Office Release)
UMass Food Scientist, David Sela, Studies Human Milk for Healthy Microbes
April 14, 2015
Breast milk seems like a simple nutritious cocktail for feeding babies, but it is so much more than that. It also contains nutrients that feed the beneficial bacteria in a baby’s gut, and it contains substances that can change a baby’s behaviour. So, when a mother breastfeeds her child, she isn’t just feeding it. She is also building a world inside it and simultaneously manipulating it.
To Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who specialises in milk, these acts are all connected. She suspects that substances in milk, by shaping the community of microbes in a baby’s gut, can affect its behaviour in ways that ultimately benefit the mother. It’s a thought-provoking and thus far untested hypothesis, but it’s not far-fetched. Together with graduate student Cary Allen-Blevins and David Sela, a food scientist at the University of Massachussetts, Hinde has laid out her ideas in a paper that fuses neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and microbiology. (National Geographic 4/8/15)
UMass Amherst scientist and international team document songbird's migration
April 13, 2015
AMHERST, Mass. – For more than 50 years, scientists had tantalizing clues suggesting that a tiny, boreal forest songbird known as the blackpoll warbler departs each fall from New England and eastern Canada to migrate nonstop in a direct line over the Atlantic Ocean toward South America, but proof was hard to come by.
Now, for the first time an international team of biologists report “irrefutable evidence” that the birds complete a nonstop flight ranging from about 1,410 to 1,721 miles (2,270 to 2,770 km) in just two to three days, making landfall somewhere in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the islands known as the Greater Antilles, from there going on to northern Venezuela and Columbia.
First author Bill DeLuca, an environmental conservation research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with colleagues at the University of Guelph, Ontario, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and other institutions, says, “For small songbirds, we are only just now beginning to understand the migratory routes that connect temperate breeding grounds to tropical wintering areas. (4/14/15 PRI; 4/10/15 Deccan Chronicle; 4/1/15 News Office)
UMass Amherst Food Scientist Honored for Work with Edible Oils
April 2, 2015
AMHERST, Mass. – The American Oil Chemists’ Society has honored University of Massachusetts Amherst food scientist Yeonhwa Park with the Timothy L. Mounts Award for her “significant and important contributions in the area of bioactive lipids and their impact on health conditions such as obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis and cardiovascular disease.”
A recognized international expert in edible oil applications and health and nutrition of lipids, Park will receive a plaque, a $750 honorarium and will deliver the award lecture, “Conjugated Linoleic Acid: 30-year Research,” at the AOCS annual meeting in Orlando in May. The AOCS announced Park’s honor and other award winners this week in its member magazine, Inform. (4/2/15 News Office Release)
Million Dollar Question
March 18, 2015
It’s difficult to predict the impact this winter will have on dollar spot pressure. Experts, including Dr. Geunhwa Jung, associate professor of turfgrass pathology at the University of Massachusetts, helps provide insight in order to control this costly turf pathogen. (Golf Course Industry, 3/17/15)
Non-native Plants in U.S.: Widespread, and Plenty of Space to Invade
March 12, 2015
AMHERST, Mass. – A new study, the first comprehensive assessment of native vs. non-native plant distribution in the continental United States, finds non-native plant species are much more widespread than natives, a finding that lead author Bethany Bradley at the University of Massachusetts Amherst called “very surprising.” ( Croplife.com 3/11/15; News Office Release)
