Hey! I Got a Question About That

MENTAL HEALTH: School is already stressful enough without a pandemic and polarizing election thrown in. Nate and Sam wondered how students can take care of their mental health during these historically stressful times. Kate Staley, director of outreach for counseling and psychological services at Penn State and Chris Palma, associate dean for undergraduate students, join Nate and S

GRAD SCHOOL: It’s season two of “Hey, I got a question about that” and Nate and Sam are back and better than ever. In this episode (with an interview filmed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic), Nicole Famularo and Albanie Hendrickson-Stives visit the studio to talk about graduate school and their research in Christine Keating’s lab in the Department of Chemistry. What is gradua

PANDEMIC: Nate and Same talk to Doug Cavener, the Verne M. Willaman Dean of the Eberly College of Science at Penn State via Zoom about how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the college. Can the dean work from home? How did remote learning work for science classes? Did research continue?For more information on the response to Covid-19 or to find ways to support Penn State and our s

GENETIC TESTING: Cheryl Keller, associate research professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State, stops by the studio to talk about genetic testing and direct-to-consumer genetics. What can these genetics tests tell us? How are tests for things like Tay-Sachs disease or Sickle-cell disease different from direct-to-consumer genetic tests? How reliable are they?Links

MICROBIOME: Emily Davenport, assistant professor of biology at Penn State, visits Nate and Sam in the newly-revamped studio to talk sh*t. Well, sort of. Emily studies the human microbiome, how it evolved, and how it is related to human health. So, what is the microbiome? What kind of organisms make up our microbiome? How come it seems to be in the news so much lately? And, should w

EMERGING DISEASES AND BATS: Nita Bharti, Lloyd Huck Early Career Professor and assistant professor of biology at Penn State, drops in to the studio to help Nate and Sam understand how human encroachment into animal habitats is impacting emerging diseases and how satellite data can help us understand this process. Where do emerging diseases come from? What do bats have to do with it

BIG DATA: Francesca Chiaromonte, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Statistics for the Life Sciences at Penn State, joins Nate and Sam in the studio to talk about data, BIG data. Massive amounts of data are being collected constantly from genome sequences, to digital health records, and trends on social media. What is making the data so big? What are statisticians doing

PLANETS: Chris Palma, associate dean for undergraduate students in the Eberly College of Science and teaching professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, visits the studio to explain to Nate and Sam that nostalgia is not a proper scientific argument and that Pluto is not a planet. So, what is a planet and what defines them? What else is out there in the solar system? Fin

ANIMALS ADAPT: Tracy Langkilde, professor and head of the Department of Biology at Penn State, joins Nate and Sam in the studio to discuss how animals respond to changes in their environment, like invasive species and traffic noise. How do lizards and frogs respond to such abrupt changes? Can they adapt? Is there a cost?Links to Tracy's work: - @TracyLangkilde on Twitter - htt

VACCINES: Too many guests to fit into our tiny studio this month! So, Nate and Sam take a trip to the Millennium Science Complex at Penn State to talk to Scott Lindner, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology; Matt Ferrari, associate professor of biology and of statistics; and Troy Sutton, assistant professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences, about vaccines.