Does the thought of eating bugs make you cringe? You’re not alone, especially in further north areas like Michigan. “We have these harsh winters, [so] insects aren’t available,” says Julie Lesnik, an anthropology professor at Wayne State University who specializes in the evolution of the human diet and using insects as a food source. “It’s not a part of a lot of traditional diets in higher latitudes. “This isn’t just something that primitive people eat, this is a food resource that has been smartly used for millions of years and in a lot of ways we are silly for ignoring it.” But Lesnik makes the argument that eating — and farming — insects may make sense for a growing population where our food system leads to growing inequity, hunger and obesity. Bugs are also an environmentally-friendly food source and rich in nutrients, and a culture built around it with recipes and even a business in metro Detroit. WDET’s Anna Sysling spoke to Lesnik on the colonialist history of our bug aversion, the case for an insect-based farming system and how you can start dabbling in this diet.

Anne P. DePrince, professor of psychology at the University of Denver, and Jennifer M. Gómez, Wayne State University assistant professor, wrote a Conversation piece about the trial of media mogul Harvey Weinstein and the painful effects on women and minorities. “For months, he (Weinstein) has presented his pain to us, granting a hospital-room interview to catalog his suffering and using a walker on his way in and out of the courthouse. His defense team has argued he deserves your sympathy. They asked the judge to let Weinstein’s surgeon testify to confirm their client is “hurt and enfeebled. These requests for your compassion are reminders that sympathy is not automatic. Not everyone gets our sympathy when they show us their pain. Whose pain, then, are we most likely to see, believe and ultimately award our sympathy? And what do those tendencies mean for health outcomes and courtroom justice? As trauma psychologists, we have spent a great deal of time researching the impact of violence and how survivors are treated when they disclose. In studying trauma and intimate violence, we have learned much about whose pain is believed or disbelieved. Studies suggest there is bias against women and ethnic minorities in both the health care and criminal justice systems. Pain bias in the health care system.”

A team from Wayne State University, led by Miriam Greenberg, Ph.D., professor of biological sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recently received a grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to work on potential new targets for treating Barth syndrome (BTHS). The four-year, nearly $1.5 million award, aims to identify specific metabolites as candidates for new treatments for Barth syndrome and other cardiomyopathies. Barth syndrome is a rare and life-threatening, X-linked genetic disorder that primarily affects males and is passed from mother to son; women who are carriers do not show symptoms of the disorder. Fifty percent of children born to a mother who is a carrier will inherit the defective gene, and all daughters born to an affected man will be carriers. BTHS is caused by a mutation in the tafazzin gene that results in decreased production of cardiolipin, an essential lipid for energy metabolism. According to Greenberg, BTHS causes numerous pathologies, including cardiomyopathy, a disorder of the heart muscle; neutropenia, a reduction in the number of white blood cells; hypotonia, reduced muscle tone; undeveloped skeletal muscles and muscle weakness; delayed growth; decreased stamina; physical disability; and methylglutaconic aciduria, an increase in an organic acid that is characteristic of abnormal mitochondrial function.

President Donald Trump has been acquitted of two impeachment charges. The hearings have been endowed with an air of inevitability. But the predictable partisan conclusion of this process was upset by Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) surprising break from party lines. Romney made history with his vote to remove the president from office on the charge of abuse of power, making him the first senator to vote in favor of impeaching a president from his own party. “There are areas of agreement between Democrats and Republicans. It’s hard to imagine that happening during a presidential election year,” says Marc Kruman, founding director of the Center for the Study of Citizenship and professor of history. Ultimately the Utah senator’s vote didn’t impact President Trump’s swift acquittal, but it did raise questions regarding the state of American politics and the role of congress moving forward. He says this impeachment process has, not surprisingly, been viewed through the lens of partisan politics. The unwillingness of elected officials to see beyond party has left American democracy in a fragile state, says Kruman. In order to restore some type of order he says there has to be a move toward compromise and consensus. “There are, in fact, areas of agreement between Democrats and Republicans that they should work on. It’s hard to imagine that happening during a presidential election year.”

Frederic S. Pearson, professor of political science and director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, wrote an op-ed tracing the U.S.-Iran relations. “The up-and-down U.S.-Iranian relationship, at times teetering on the brink of war, is highly complicated and fraught with historical memories; it cannot be characterized simply as black and white/good and evil. Recent developments indicate that with the crackdown on Iran and its militias, as well as Washington’s blow to Kurdish forces in Syria with the green light to Turkish occupation of their zones, the U.S. has essentially weakened the two most effective anti-ISIS forces, while stirring up massive anti-American popular responses in Iran, Iraq and Yemen.”

By 2050 there will be an estimated 10 billion humans living on this planet. That's not just a lot of mouths to feed, those folks will be, on average, wealthier than today's population with a taste for the foods found in regions like the U.S. and Western Europe. We simply don't have the capability, the land or production resources to ensure that many people can eat a cheeseburger whenever the mood strikes. Luckily, researchers from around the globe are working on alternative protein sources to supplement our existing beef, pork and chicken. Julie Lesnik, a biological anthropologist at Wayne State University, advocates that we look to get our meat from smaller, more resource-efficient animals than cattle -- specifically, crickets. She points out that, per kilogram, crickets offer roughly the same amount of protein as beef as well as significantly more micronutrients since you're consuming the exoskeleton as well. She also notes that given their diminutive stature and affinity for cramped dark places, crickets require far less arable land than cattle do, citing a 2013 report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. "When we're thinking about why we don't eat insects, it's really a story of Europe, and that Europe being in high latitudes, insects aren't available year-round," Lesnick continued. "Eating insects in the summer can give a reprieve from hunting, but it's nutritionally redundant, so it's not an important resource."

Jorge L. Chinea, professor of history and director of the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, wrote a piece for The Conversation examining the indigenous heritage of Puerto Rico and the major challenges facing the island. “Tremors and aftershocks are still rocking Puerto Rico, weeks after a magnitude 6.4 earthquake toppled buildings, killed at least one person and injured another eight on Jan. 7. Families have begun leaving the island because it won’t stop shaking. For many on the island, the devastation is a reminder of September 2017 when Hurricane Maria killed 3,000 people and as many as 200,000 Puerto Ricans were forced to hastily relocate to the mainland United States. These major disasters have ravaged the island’s cultural heritage, too. Numerous historic landmarks – including a 2,000-year-old archaeological site containing priceless evidence of the island’s earliest dwellers, the Taíno people – have been destroyed. As a historian of colonial Latin America born in Puerto Rico, I recognize that between the 15th-century Spanish colonization and the 1898 U.S. annexation of the island, the Taíno’s story has been all but erased from the historic record.”

Heather E. Mooney, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Wayne State University, wrote an article for The Conversation regarding the effectiveness of private programs designed for troubled teens. “The troubled teen industry is a mostly unregulated collection of for-profit programs that claim to rehabilitate out-of-control youth. Between 50,000 and 100,000 adolescents currently spend at least part of the year in these facilities. Their enrollment – or confinement, depending on the arrangement or their perspective – can prevent these relatively privileged kids from joining the 48,000 youth caught in the U.S. juvenile justice system. With little academic research about these private programs serving troubled teens, the conversation around them strikes me as either overly positive or negative. I’m skeptical about the positive research because most of it has been conducted and funded by the schools themselves or the organizations representing them. These studies also tend to look at limited time frames, such as two years or less after participants have left a “troubled teens” program.”

Susan P. Fino, professor of political science, wrote a piece for The Conversation about the senators’ impeachment oath. “The 100 United States senators who are jurors in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump have taken a special oath in order to take part in that proceeding. As they enter the active phase of the trial on Tuesday, this oath is supposed to govern their behavior. It’s not the first oath that the lawmakers have taken in their Senate careers. Members of Congress, as well as federal judicial officers and members of state legislatures, must swear to “support the Constitution.” But the Constitution does not specify the form of the oath. So the very first Congress crafted an oath of office and – with minor modifications – that is the oath each member of Congress swears when he or she takes her seat in the House or the Senate. There is a second oath that members of the Senate must take when conducting an impeachment trial. The specific text for this oath was developed in 1868 for the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a day to reflect not only on the man, but the movement that he came to represent. That reflection has some people thinking about all of the civil rights icons we’ve lost recently. Judge Damon Keith, Rep. John Conyers, Rep. Elijah Cummings, Aretha Franklin, Toni Morrison, Harris Wofford, and many more. As we move further into this decade we’ll lose more. What does the loss of the Civil Rights generation mean for the fight for equal rights moving forward? “They wanted to change laws, they wanted to improve legislation, they wanted to improve America,” says Ollie Johnson, chair and professor of the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University. “I think we have unfinished business. And it really pains me to talk about it,” 

The fish populations of the Great Lakes have changed dramatically in the years since invasive species first arrived. Bloodsucking sea lampreys have decimated native lake trout, and tiny alewives have feasted on the eggs and young of trout and other native species. But there’s good news too, as researchers roll out solutions to help manage invasive fish populations and maintain the diversity of species. Donna Kashian, SciFri Book Club reader and biology professor at Wayne State University said, “I have so many wonderful memories of the Great Lakes, both as a child whose parents had a cabin near Lake Michigan and as an adult doing research on the lakes. But one in particular stands out. I was doing research on Lake Huron, I don’t even remember what we were looking at on that particular day. It was late in the season, maybe August. We were in the middle of the lake—flat water, clear blue skies—and monarch butterflies were just flying everywhere. We’re in the middle of their migration south. It was so surreal and beautiful. I knew birds use the lake as a flyway in their migration, but I never knew monarchs did.

Tensions between Iran and the United States have taken a turn, with retaliation on military bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops and a statement from President Trump about the conflict. Trump says there were no U.S. casualties in the attacks, and announced a new round of sanctions on Iran. He also called on NATO to become more involved “in the Middle East process.” The president struck a tone that suggested Iran is standing down after its retaliation on Tuesday night. But this is just another development in the long-running story of the U.S. relationship with Iran — tracing back to the birth of the Islamic Republic. Saeed Khan, Wayne State University Near and Middle East expert, discussed what these events mean in this context. 

Kirsten Carlson, associate professor of law and adjunct associate professor of political science, wrote an article for The Conversation about President Trump’s refusal to hand over records to Congress and allow executive branch employees to provide information and testimony to Congress during the impeachment battle. Carlson calls these actions “the strongest test yet of legal principles that over the past 200 years have not yet been fully defined by U.S. courts.”

Volunteers at Wayne State University had been braving the elements for hours on an October morning. The wind chapped cheeks and numbed fingers as volunteers wrangled giant blue tarps with the names, symbols, and atomic numbers of chemical elements painted on them. When gusts kicked up, the workers would joke that they were building the world’s largest kite. They were actually attempting to build the world’s largest periodic table. And they had competition. Four days earlier, on the opposite side of Michigan, at Grand Valley State University, another group of crafty science enthusiasts had assembled what it believed was the world’s largest periodic table. Michigan became the proud birthplace of two gigantic periodic tables within a week. The timing wasn’t an accident, either. It was National Chemistry Week during the International Year of the Periodic Table. Although the groups hatched their schemes independently of each other, they shared the same drive to do something huge to get lots of people—and not just chemists—talking about chemistry and the iconic table. By the end of the day, drones and news helicopters had circled the periodic table at Wayne State, which covered an area larger than three American football fields. CBS News shared a photo of the table on Twitter with its 7 million followers, as did ABC’s World News Tonight with its 1.4 million followers.

Why is it difficult for some people to eat vegetables? Researchers at the University of Kentucky believe a certain gene makes compounds in some vegetables taste particularly bitter to some people, so they avoid nutritious, heart-healthy vegetables like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage. Humans are born with two copies of a taste gene called TAS2R38. Those who inherit two copies of the variant called AVI are not sensitive to the bitterness of these chemicals. But those who inherit one copy of AVI and one copy of PAV are especially sensitive and find these foods particularly bitter. For this study, researchers investigated the possibility that this association existed in people with two or more cardiovascular disease risk factors. Tonia Reinhard, a senior lecturer at Wayne State University and course director for clinical nutrition at the university’s school of medicine, said it’s intriguing that the University of Kentucky researchers identified genetic regions that relate to taste that can influence one’s food choices and potentially influence development of certain chronic diseases. “Since fruits and vegetables contain numerous phytonutrients and essential nutrients that can reduce inflammation and oxidative damage — two key damaging processes linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases — anything that affects dietary intake of these foods can possibly influence disease development,” said Reinhard, a fellow of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and past president of the Michigan Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She added that people should remember that human taste perception is a complex process that is affected by numerous variables. “It is useful for individuals to try to understand their own preferences and when unhealthful, use their cognitive function to override some of those,” she said.

“The most powerful people in the criminal justice system are the prosecutors,” said Marvin Zalman, a criminal justice professor at Wayne State University who has written extensively about wrongful convictions. When DNA analysis started leading to exonerations in the early 2000s, prosecutors resisted any sort of systemic review of their cases, Zalman said. Now, with dozens of review units, “it’s a remarkable change. They have more of the ability to generate exonerations than the innocence organizations. They have the capacity to cut through the years of federal review, habeas review, the complexity of these cases. The ability of prosecutors is great.”

Andrew Port didn’t anticipate a seat he took on a train while studying abroad in Europe in 1987 would change his life forever. But that train ride ended up being Port's ticket to witnessing history — the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Port — then a junior in college and now a Wayne State University professor — sparked a conversation with a young German man sitting in the seat next to him. That man took a liking to Port, inviting him to a New Year's Eve party in West Berlin. Port attended the party, where he met a Berliner with whom he fell in love. After finishing his study abroad and graduating from Yale in the spring of 1989, he moved to West Berlin in October 1989 to be with his girlfriend. He couldn't have foreseen that he would be involved in one of the most consequential moments in modern history the following month. As an American living in Berlin for only about a month, the scene was especially surreal, Port said. Port went on to study history. He conducted research from Germany as a Harvard graduate student from 1994 to 1996. He has published several books on post-war Germany, some of which garnered significant media attention in Germany, and now teaches German history courses at Wayne State. 

News of the United States pulling out of Syria has triggered upheaval and turmoil in the region. The Trump Administration’s change of course in Syria has complicated the already complex power structure in the Middle East. Wayne State University history professor Aaron Retish joined Stephen Henderson on Detroit Today to help unpack the complex web of interests and influence in the region. On the administration’s newfound adoption of non-intervention policy, Retish says, “There are going to be ramifications for that, one of them is going to be instability and the other one is going to be new power asserting themselves.” Those power players he is speaking of include Russia, Turkey and the Assad-led Syrian government, all of which have unique motivations. Retish asserts that we have to rethink the region if we are not going to commit to a military presence. This new American foreign policy approach in the area might mean “a totally refigured Middle East.”

Sylvia Taschka teaches modern German and world history at Wayne State University and is the author of a book about Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, the last German ambassador to the United States before the Second World War. Taschka wrote a historical perspective piece focusing on the question: Should diplomats resign or decline to serve if they have deep moral misgivings about their government’s policy, or should they remain in office to try to prevent worse from happening?

To mark the International Year of the Periodic Table, Wayne State University’s Department of Chemistry created what is believed to be the largest periodic table in history — although no official record actually exists. Wayne State’s Chemistry Club, with help from clubs at University of Michigan Dearborn, U-M Flint, Detroit Mercy and Lawrence Tech, built a table that measured over 190,000 square feet, or approximately three football fields. “We went to a regional meeting and someone said, ‘Let’s make the biggest one ever,' ” said Sue White, a chemistry club co-adviser with Charlie Fehl. “It was an insane idea, but all we got was good advice on the best way to do it. Students and the department were very enthusiastic. People went out of their way to help us do the craziest thing ever.” Besides the 30-by-40-foot blue tarps used for each element, it took 95 gallons of paint and over 250 volunteers. Wednesday’s winds caused some concern, but 7,000 garden stakes kept everything in place.