Category Archives: DNA

Westchester County prosecutors have given the green light for DNA testing on evidence linked to the 1992 conviction of Carolyn Warmus in the Fatal Attraction killing of her lovers wife.

Two years ago, Warmus, a former school teacher in Westchester, was granted parole following her conviction for her alleged role in the famed 1989 fatal shooting of Greenburgh resident Betty Jeanne Solomon, the wife of Warmus' lover, Paul Solomon, nine times in the back.

Warmus was sentenced to a term of 25 years to life in prison.

Warmus and Solomon had met when they both were teaching at the Greenville Elementary School in Edgemont. At the time of the fatal incident, Warmus, the daughter of a millionaire insurance executive, was 27, while her victim was 40.

Since being imprisoned, Warmus has vehemently maintained her innocence, and sought to have several pieces of evidence tested to determine if they can exonerate her and identify a new suspect.

This week, Westchester County District Attorney Mimi Rocahs office agreed to perform DNA testing on that evidence, which includes a glove and bag found near Solomons body, that contributed to Warmus' conviction.

According to Warmus attorneys, the DNA testing could represent a significant development in clearing her name. Both they and the prosecution are set to meet at a later date to determine how testing will proceed.

"However, because a prior DA's administration initially consented to DNA testing, and because we have only just established this office's first-ever independent Conviction Review Bureau and developed the bureaus intake protocols, we will make an exception and consent to the requested DNA testing in this specific case," a spokesperson for Rocah stated.

The murder garnered national attention and happened two years after the release of the blockbuster movie Fatal Attraction, in which longtime Westchester resident Glenn Close, who lived in Bedford, starred as a book editor who had an affair with a happily married man, played by Michael Douglas.

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DNA Testing To Be Done In Nationally Known 'Fatal Attraction' Case In Westchester - Peekskill Daily Voice

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23andMe DNA kits on sale: Save up to $50 - Mashable

A skull of the extinct horned crocodile from Madagascar (Voay robustus), which is part of the American Museum of Natural Historys paleontology collection. Credit: M. Ellison/AMNH

New ancient DNA-based study on Madagascar crocodile suggests that modern crocodiles likely originated in Africa.

A study led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History has resolved a long-standing controversy about an extinct horned crocodile that likely lived among humans in Madagascar. Based on ancient DNA, the research shows that the horned crocodile was closely related to true crocodiles, including the famous Nile crocodile, but on a separate branch of the crocodile family tree. The study, published today (April 27, 2021) in the journal Communications Biology, contradicts the most recent scientific thinking about the horned crocodiles evolutionary relationships and also suggests that the ancestor of modern crocodiles likely originated in Africa.

This crocodile was hiding out on the island of Madagascar during the time when people were building the pyramids and was probably still there when pirates were getting stranded on the island, said lead author Evon Hekkala, an assistant professor at Fordham University and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. They blinked out just before we had the modern genomic tools available to make sense of the relationships of living things. And yet, they were the key to understanding the story of all the crocodiles alive today.

The arrival of modern humans in Madagascar between about 9,000 and 2,500 years ago preceded the extinction of many of the islands large animals, including giant tortoises, elephant birds, dwarf hippos, and several lemur species. One lesser-known extinction that occurred during this period was that of an endemic horned crocodile, Voay robustus. Early explorers to Madagascar noted that Malagasy peoples consistently referred to two types of crocodiles on the island: a large robust crocodile and a more gracile form with a preference for rivers. This suggests that both types persisted until very recently, but only the gracile form, now recognized as an isolated population of the Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus), is currently is found on the island.

Despite nearly 150 years of investigation, the position of the horned crocodile in the tree of life has remained controversial. In the 1870s, it was first described as a new species within the true crocodile group, which includes the Nile, Asian, and American crocodiles. Then, in the early part of the 20th century, it was thought that the specimens simply represented very old Nile crocodiles. And finally, in 2007, a study based on physical characteristics of the fossil specimens concluded that the horned crocodile was actually not a true crocodile, but in the group that includes dwarf crocodiles.

Teasing apart the relationships of modern crocodiles is really difficult because of the physical similarities, Hekkala said. Many people dont even realize that there are multiple species of crocodiles, and they see them as this animal thats unchanging through time. But weve been trying to get to the bottom of the great diversity that exists among them.

To fully examine the horned crocodiles place in the evolutionary tree, Hekkala and her collaborators at the Museum made a number of attempts to sequence DNA from fossil specimens, including two well-preserved skulls that have been at the Museum since the 1930s.

This a project weve tried to do on and off for many years, but the technology just hadnt advanced enough, so it always failed, said study co-author George Amato, emeritus director of the Museums Institute for Comparative Genomics. But in time, we had both the computational setup and the paleogenomics protocols that could actually fish out this DNA from the fossil and finally find a home for this species.

The results place the horned crocodile right next to the true crocodile branch of the evolutionary tree, making it the closest species to the common ancestor of the crocodiles alive today.

This finding was surprising and also very informative to how we think about the origin of the true crocodiles found around the tropics today, Amato said. The placement of this individual suggests that true crocodiles originated in Africa and from there, some went to Asia and some went to the Caribbean and the New World. We really needed the DNA to get the correct answer to this question.

Reference: 27 April 2021, Communications Biology.DOI: 10.1038/s42003-021-02017-0

Other authors on the study include John Gatesy, Apurva Narechania, Shaena Montanari, and Mark Norell from the American Museum of Natural History; Robert Meredith and Matthew Aardema from the Museum and Montclair State University; Michael Russello from the University of British Columbia; Evelyn Jenson from the University of British Columbia and Newcastle University; and Christopher Brochu from the University of Iowa.

Funding was provided in part by the University of California, Riverside, Fordham University Faculty Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation grant no.s RAPID DEB-1931213, DEB-1556701, and DBI-1725932.

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Ancient DNA Reveals New Spot in the Tree of Life for Extinct Horned Crocodile - SciTechDaily

Zhang: This is what I find so fascinating. If the bacteria are largely the same, why dont we have Black Death anymore or big outbreaks of bubonic plague?

Krause: First of all, we changed our lifestyle quite a bit. We are just living in much more hygienic conditions. Plague is actually not usually transmitted between people, but between animals and people, and usually the vector is a flea. We dont live with mice and rats in the house as much.

Also, the type of rodents changed. In the medieval time, when the Black Death happened, we had a very large population of black ratsmuch, much bigger than today. And in fact, they were largely replaced by brown rats, Rattus norvegicus. Now, brown rats are very different in their behavior. They live in the sewage, and they live in the ground. They dont live under the roof. The black rat was called the roof rat. They were living where people stored their grain, and when people still had the grain storage in the house, thats where the rats were.

But people that do have exposure to animals, like people that live in the countryside, people that go hunting, they are usually the people that contract plague these days. Theres several cases in the U.S. every year. And there are warning signs if you go to the Grand Canyon: Dont feed the squirrels, because you could get plague. Its actually moving in the U.S. from the West Coast to the East Coast with rodent populations.

Zhang: I live in New York, so I guess we have that to look forward to at some point.

Krause: And you have a lot of rats in New York.

Zhang: Yes, but theyre brown rats!

Krause: Fortunately, yes.

Zhang: The spread of brown rats through global shipping routes is one of the big ecological stories of the past several centuries. Environmentally, its been devastating, especially for a lot of island ecosystems, so its really interesting to think about the role they might have played in spreading diseaseor not spreading it.

Krause: Some people speculate that the brown rat saved us from the plague. One of the mysteries is that the plague disappeared in the beginning of the 18th century, when you still have rats, when you still have hygienic conditions which are not great. What happens in Europe is that the new rat gets introduced. The brown rat arrivestheres some historical documentation around the 1720sand then it starts spreading. Actually, wherever the brown rat moves, the black rat is getting replaced, because they are really aggressive toward black rats. The black rats disappear. Its ironic, almost, that people, when they see rats today, they think about the plague and How horrible. But maybe that rat that you see today, like in New York in the subway, is actually the one that saved us from the plague.

Zhang: I think this really speaks to how disease is contingent on human behavior. We might think of diseases as things that just exist in naturetheyre out there and theyre trying to kill us. But whats happening is that these pathogens are only successful if they find and exploit the seams in human behavior. We created the conditions for the plague because we started living in cities, because we started living with rats, because we have fleas.

Original post:
Human Teeth Hold the Secrets of Ancient Plagues - The Atlantic

Imagine a small house whose exterior is covered with planters full of ripe radishes, carrots, and lettuce. Indoors, another wall of plants stretches floor to ceiling. Their microbe-rich roots capture harmful air pollutants. If you touch the plants, beneficial microbes cross to you, possibly prompting a subtle shift of your own microbiome toward better health.

The house captures rainwater, purifying it on-site with solar energy. The entire structure is made of flaked-wood slabs that are strong enough to replace steel. Unlike steel, though, these slabs sequester carbon. The building can be taken apart, the slabs re-used elsewhere, or their carbon released to other organisms that keep it from re-entering the atmosphere.

Houses like these may become commonplace even urgently necessary as the worlds resources grow scarcer, the planet warms, and the climate weirds. So the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA), a transdisciplinary research enterprise based in the School of Architecture, is rethinking global sustainability for the 21st century.

By combining novel science and technology with vernacular building principles, center researchers aim to enable a truly sustainable built environment, one that that not only provides shelter but also fosters healthy ecosystems and even bends the CO2 curve.

Our [current] infrastructural model is bankrupt. It's doesn't work. It's neither resilient nor life-supporting, says Anna Dyson, the Hines Professor of Sustainable Architectural Design, who also holds appointments in the schools of Architecture, Environment, and Nursing. What we seek to do is partner with [emerging economies] to forge a 21st-century way of resiliently coexisting with nonhuman living ecosystems and supplying our requirements for energy, water, and materials sustainably.

Founded three years ago by Dyson, Yale CEA brings together faculty, research scientists, and Ph.D. students from multiple schools, alongside industrial collaborators; collectively, their affiliations include the Yale schools of Architecture, the Environment, Medicine, Nursing, Public Health, Management, Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and Law.

Instead of a traditional approach that sends raw building materials on a linear journey through consumption and waste, Yale CEA faculty instead train students to work with natural systems, so that resources, energy, and life flow into, within, around, and away from a building. Everything is multifunctional; nothing is wasted. A system that captures sunlight to reduce indoor lighting needs, for instance, may also use the warmth to heat and purify water. A wall supports a microfarm, whose ecoystems are designed to interact with human beings and promote health. Building materials keep carbon out of the atmosphere while providing structural support. Such buildings are largely self-sufficient, yet they constantly interact with their occupants and their surroundings in ways that aim to leave both better off.

We go all the way into the lab and work alongside physicists, material scientists, and engineers to look at how we can manipulate energy and material flows in different ways, and how we can satisfy multiple technical, functional, aesthetic, and cultural criteria simultaneously, Dyson says. If we can do that, we can deliver systems that have a lot of value to society, and we can start to move towards on-site net zero energy, water, et cetera in a real way.

I tell students all the time, You are so lucky to be entering the field right now, because architecture has blown wide open, says Alan Organschi, an architect, senior critic at the School of Architecture, and principal of the New Haven firm Gray Organschi Architecture. Its no longer sitting at a desk and drawing skyscrapers or houses. It's thinking systemically about what we consume and where it's going to go at the end of its life.

Suddenly [students are] able to see buildings, not as permanent objects in the landscape, but as technological objects that litter the landscape [and] that must be accounted for. That's an educational paradigm shift.

This shift comes not a moment too soon. Globally, buildings account for 40% of global energy use and 25% of water consumption, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The built environment already accounts for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, the UNEP estimates, even as urbanization accelerates all over the world.

But we could be designing to remedy the situation.

Water purification, for example, is a crucial function a building could play. Dyson and Jaehong Kim, the Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor and chair of Chemical & Environmental Engineering, are developing a solar water disinfection window unit that could provide clean drinking water and safe disinfectant products like hydrogen peroxide to people who otherwise lack safe access to both. In addition, this unit can provide power and hot water, as well as reduce indoor glare and heat gain inside the household.

Mandi Pretorius, a Ph.D. student who is working with Dyson and Kim on solar disinfection, points out that the new ways of thinking are in some ways premodern: less [about] centrality and authority and control and more about distributed decentralized processes, such as water treatment that doesnt depend on municipal facilities.

Then, too, theres what we build with. New building materials may not only be lighter and more renewable than steel and concrete but also could remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it, Organschi says.

For years, he explains, the standard sustainability story has held that most buildings life-cycle energy consumption occurs during the years when they are in active use. That has led to an emphasis on creating efficient, well-insulated structures.

But up-front resources and construction the steps that take place before anyone ever steps into the building account for a substantial share of emissions, Organschi has found. So its crucial to take that embodied carbon stage into account.

Steel and concrete, for instance, are resource-intensive. But a promising alternative is engineered wood products. With wood harvested from sustainably managed forests where soil health and high biodiversity are maintained, we could store vast amounts of carbon in our buildings. Humanitys very homes could serve as a collective global carbon sink. Another type of construction materials that can safely tie up carbon in buildings is made of waste from agricultural products. These relationships undergird what is called a circular material economy.

As a bonus, interiors made with wood products rather than mineral derivatives like drywall can buffer moisture and heat levels and may even support human health effects that Organschi is studying with collaborators from Yale School of Public Health and others.

The health effects of the indoor environment are a central CEA concern.

We're reinventing the DNA of the built environment, Dyson says and, with grants to study the genetic material of indoor microorganisms, she means it literally.

Humanity has spent most of its history outdoors, she points out, a situation that changed comparatively recently.

With indoor environments, we're cutting ourselves off from a biodiverse ecosystem within which we co-evolved, Dyson says.

Thats something architecture Ph.D. candidate Phoebe Mankiewicz 24 is working to understand.

Trained as a biologist, Mankiewicz calls herself Yale CEAs green sheep. She is investigating how bacteria in the roots of indoor plants might affect indoor air quality. The right mix of plants and microbes could reduce air pollutants, regulate humidity and temperature, and influence human health by colonizing our bodies, releasing beneficial compounds into the air, or calming our nervous systems.

Such complex territory remains barely explored by biologists, let alone architects, according to Mankiewicz. With experience in traditional science labs, she is designing experiments with different light levels and plant growth media, such as nutrient-rich liquids or potting mixes, at Yale School of the Environment. Working with the School of Public Health faculty member Krystal Pollitt, Mankiewicz will measure how these plant systems interact with indoor pollutants, like formaldehyde emitted by carpeting.

In no other program would I be allowed to look at biology and plant ecology, physiology and soil science, and air quality chemistry all together, said Mankiewicz. I wouldn't get to measure all of these variables, which are so inherently interconnected.

Understanding how peoples bodies react to a space can help architects build for better health. Yale CEAs Socioecological Visual Analytics (SEVA) tool collects data from sensors monitoring the indoor environment, such as carbon dioxide levels, and physiologic measures like heart rate, explains a center co-founder Mohamed Aly Etman, a research scientist at the School of Architecture. He uses SEVA with Yale School of Medicine researchers to better understand how to design healthful interiors.

In 2018, the School of Architecture, Yale CEA, and Gray Organschi Architecture showcased their ideas with a prototype tiny house in New York City on United Nations (UN) Plaza, one that powers itself as well as nourishing its residents. Built by JIG DesignBuild, Organschis construction company, of sustainable materials, the 22-square-meter Ecological Living Module (ELM) generated solar energy and captured daylight to replace electric light through a novel system that uses less than 1% of the toxic, non-renewable semi-conductor materials found in conventional solar panels. The little building, designed byGray Organschi Architecture, also harvested and purified rainwater and remediated its own indoor air, while graywater irrigated a micro-farm attached to the outer walls.

Such near self-sufficiency is crucial, for example, for refugees living in cities that prohibit them from accessing local infrastructure. But its also key in places that lack pre-existing infrastructure altogether. Yale CEA aims next to partner with UNEP to build an ELM in a town in Guatemala, one of many impoverished communities that are being devastated by emigration. There, the solar-water disinfection and farm walls could demonstrate novel methods to provide residents with safe drinking water and a nutrient-rich diet.

The approach to the building is replicable, if not necessarily its materials or final form, Etman said. Those details will vary depending on where in the world its built. In his home country, Egypt, for example, such a house could harvest more solar energy an abundant resource there and it would also have to accommodate a larger family, in keeping with cultural norms in that region.

Projects like this allow for the kind of urban and ecosystemic testing and experimentation that large commercial buildings in developed cities dont, Dyson said. Yale CEA continues to collaborate with the United Nations.

The built environment process is conservative and risk-averse. The components often depend on each other, so it's hard to make the kind of wholesale change we need for a sustainable future, she says. But small-scale demonstrations permit us to show entirely new systemic models and could lead to radical change by showing what future cities could be.

Continue reading here:
Global ambition: 'Reinventing the DNA of the built environment' - Yale News

This April 22, 2021, booking photo provided by the Palm Beach County Sheriffs Office shows Richard Lange.

A DNA test has led to the arrest of a suspect in the April 1985 slaying, rape and kidnapping of a 78-year-old woman who had dementia and had wandered from her home.

The Palm Beach County Sheriffs Office announced Friday that it had arrested Richard C. Lange, 61, on first-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual assault charges.

The office did not release the victims name, but 1985 news stories identify her as Mildred Matheny, who was found unconscious, nude and beaten along a remote dirt road, about 25 miles from where she had disappeared seven hours earlier. She died 11 days later.

State and county records show Lange has a lengthy criminal record, including convictions in 1983 and 1993 for aggravated assault, receiving probation each time. He also was convicted of weapons charges in 2006 and 2012, receiving short jail sentences.

In its press release, the sheriffs office says its homicide cold case unit submitted DNA from the killing to the state database last month and Lange came up as a match. In 1985, Lange was 25 and living in Palm Beach County, records show.

Detectives received a warrant to obtain saliva from Lange, who was tested Thursday at his Boynton Beach home, about 10 miles from where Matheny was abducted. His DNA again matched the sample and he was arrested, the sheriffs office said. He denied any connection to the killing. A judge Friday ordered him held without bond.

Matheny was a widow who suffered from dementia, likely Alzheimers disease, according to a 1985 story in the Palm Beach Post. She had recently moved from Arkansas to live with her sister in Lake Worth, Florida, and was not allowed outside alone because of fears she would wander away.

But because of some family confusion, Matheny got outside on the afternoon of April 27, 1985. Neighbors had seen her walking down the street in her pajamas, which were found near her when she was discovered by a passerby hours later in Jupiter, Florida.

A sheriffs office video released last year seeking information about the slaying said Matheny may have gotten into a car with a young man outside a fast-food restaurant. Witnesses told investigators the man told them he was her neighbor and would drive her home.

Its pretty bad when a grandmother goes outside for a walk and winds up knocked out on some dirt road, Lake Worth police Lt. Marty Kerner said in 1985.

Originally posted here:
DNA test leads to arrest of suspect in 1985 Florida slaying, rape of 78-year-old woman with dementia - KTLA

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CRISPR Technology Market: Rise in focus on gene therapeutics is projected to contribute to the growth of the market - BioSpace

By Matthew Burns, WRAL.com senior producer/politics editor

Pittsboro, N.C. DNA evidence from a 45-year-old murder case in which a wrongfully convicted man was later exonerated can be used to link the man to a different homicide, the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday.

Willie Henderson Womble, 67, was convicted of first-degree murder in the Nov. 18, 1975, shooting death of Roy Brent Bullock during a robbery at a Butner convenience store. He always maintained his innocence, claiming police threatened him and forced him to sign a false confession.

Another man convicted in the case notified the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission in 2013 that Womble wasn't involved in the robbery or Bullock's death, noting that the real accomplice had died in 2012.

A panel of three judges then declared him innocent in October 2014 and ordered his release from prison.

Womble was arrested again in 2018, charged with the April 11, 2017, death of Donna Dvonne Todd in her Pittsboro apartment. She had been stabbed repeatedly with a pair of scissors.

DNA on items investigators collected from Todd's apartment matched a DNA sample the State Crime Lab still had on file from Womble's earlier case, which alerted investigators to his possible connection to Todd's slaying. They then obtained a search warrant to collect a new DNA sample from him, which confirmed their suspicions.

Womble tried to suppress the DNA evidence, saying the earlier DNA sample should have been destroyed after he was exonerated. If it had, investigators would have never had grounds to seek a second sample from him, he argued.

A trial court agreed, but prosecutors appealed, and a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals overturned the lower court's ruling and sent the case back for trial.

The appellate judges ruled unanimously that state law doesn't provide for automatic destruction of evidence in cases of wrongful conviction and that it was Womble' responsibility to petition that his DNA sample be destroyed.

See more here:
NC man was exonerated of one murder, but court says DNA evidence can be used against him in second one - WRAL.com

Just in time for Kentucky Derby season, Speed School of Engineering associate professor Stuart Williams answered a few questions about his whiskey webs research. With a background in studying fluid dynamics, Williams research has focused on the behavior of particles in suspension, also known as colloid science.

In 2017, his research yielded an interesting discovery: When American whiskey is diluted with water, it creates what he has termed whiskey webs. Read more below.

UofL News:How did you become interested in whiskey webs? What is a Whiskey web?

Williams: My great uncle worked for Brown Forman distillery and, when I was a young professor looking at all the avenues of research, I reached out to Brown Forman and learned that there were colloids in bourbon. When I went on sabbatical in 2017 at North Carolina State, I took a case of bourbon to study its colloid science. We were motivated by a Harvard study where they evaporated Scotch droplets onto a slide, where it formed a uniform film.

For our experiment, we took whiskey at about 45% alcohol by volume (ABV) and diluted it with water to 20% ABV and evaporated it. We discovered, by accident, that the resulting patterns looked like webs, nothing like the Scotch results. We liked the term whiskey webs to describe this result and decided to investigate the governing colloid science. We wondered if you could differentiate different bourbons through investigating their whiskey web patterns. Could it be used as a counterfeit measure or for quality control?

UofL News: How is this both an art and a science?

Williams: It crosses different thresholds. If you show people a picture of a whiskey web, theyre drawn to it, it has vibrant color and nice contrast. When you tell them its a whiskey droplet, theyre intrigued and cant just walk away. They want to know more. One of our whiskey webs was actually accepted into an art gallery in Texas in 2019 and it won the visitors award because people were so intrigued by it. Once people are interested, then they want to know how it formed. They ask, Whats the science behind it? Its nice that it crosses all those boundaries and produces a nice story when everything is brought together.

UofL News: Is it possible to identify different brands of whiskey by their webs?

Williams: Yes, but the caveat is that its sensitive to a fault. We found out that if the humidity changes in the lab, or if we change our water source, the pattern changes. We are working on ways of making this test robust enough to generate a consistent library, for example, such that Buffalo Trace always looks like this. Can we do it? Yes. Is it feasible to do it? Perhaps. We would have to have very precise controls in order to say yes to your question. We are still working on ways to make it more robust.

UofL News: What is your favorite whiskey web and why?

Williams: I am intrigued by Pappy Van Winkle. Its a sample where I have different ages 10, 20 year variations so it gives me a way to compare and contrast. What weve noticed is that Pappy is one that has webs in the middle but not on the perimeter. Weve noticed with some of our other 20-yr bourbons that the patterns only form on the interior. Why is that? Whats going on in the physics that gives us indication of age? Its a web that looks neat, too, but at the same time theres a science-driven reason behind it.

UofL News: What research applications and new knowledge do you expect to glean from this study?

Williams: With whiskey webs, we consider it an engineering problem we are actively pursuing to get to that identification and characterization stage. One possible research application is quality control.

Will this replace high tech applications like liquid chromatography that can really get down to the molecular level? No, but once we get that portable robust testing methodology panned out could it be used for a quick drop quality control? I think so. From a counterfeit perspective, it might work to tell us if it is bourbon or not. You could take moonshine and add colorant and call it bourbon, but we have found if it is not a bourbon, it wont create a web. Using the physics that guide this, can we apply it to other things besides whiskey? We are looking at that.

People are interested in creating a whiskey web for their personal favorites so were also working to develop an at-home kit. The challenge is to get the light just right, and not everyone has access to highly filtered water. While you need a microscope to get a really good artistic image, you can actually visualize a web with your smart phone at home. We have a kit that can make that happen.

UofL News: Whats next?

Williams: Doing outreach and education on this has been great. Whiskey webs was one of the display projects in Washington, DC in spring of 2019 selected to present to the Smithsonian. 60,000 people viewed it at the ACCelerate Festival. Outside of Kentucky, most people dont know what bourbon is. They think its just whiskey, so its great educating the public on what bourbon is. The difference, in case you dont know, is American whiskeys, inclusive of bourbon are aged in newly charred, never used, oak barrels. Whiskey webs form for any American whiskey, so for us at least its that new barrel that is the key to making these structures from what weve studied so far. (In addition, bourbon specifically, as opposed to other whiskeys, is made from a majority of corn in the grains within its mash.)

This makes for a nice evolving conversation with interested viewers this is bourbon, this is colloid science, this is how things evaporate. We enjoy telling that narrative to whoever is willing to listen. Once the pandemic allows, we are willing to go to different local and regional events to have people talk about science, talk about bourbon, talk about art, all of the above.

Thats one thing were excited about and looking forward to doing in the future, as well as, of course generating proposals and scientific ideas and trying to get the fundamental science going at the same time.

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UofL professor researches the 'DNA' of bourbon - uoflnews.com

A young boy named Dawson leans back in a white rocking chair on a balcony: "I bought some rocks from Home Depot and we just painted them. Let me show you over here."He points to his collection; there's a blue rock with orange stars and another with a flower. A few seconds later, the video carousel switches to another clip. This time it's a girl named Avery who pops a few quarters into her gumball machine and tells her 97 subscribers, "It's blue! I guessed right."If not for the tiny voices and faces, you might think you've fallen down a TikTok rabbit hole. But this is the world of Zigazoo, a social media app for kids ages three to 12.The short-form video platform launched last summer with a mission to develop healthy social media and streaming habits at an early age. It lets kids browse or participate in 30-second video challenges or activities created by zoos, museums, teachers, musicians and TV studios, encouraging them to answer questions such as "What's on your mind?" or "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Kids can then share recorded responses with their Zigazoo friends or its network of 120,000 subscribers. There's singing, dancing and pet show-and-tells.At a time when Facebook faces backlash for reportedly working on a kids version of Instagram, with advocacy groups citing excessive time on devices and social media as a main concern, Zigazoo is attracting positive attention. The company said the platform has grown by about 100% since the beginning of 2021 and has had 20 million video views to date -- two-thirds of that occurring in 2021.File video: Children could be at risk of online predators through virtual learning, FBI saysOn Thursday, the company announced a $4 million round of funding led by MaC Venture Capital, and a handful of celebrity investors, including Jimmy Kimmel, Serena Williams through her venture capital firm Serena Ventures, and Matthew Rutler, investor and head of talent at MasterClass.Williams, a serial tech investor and mother to 3-year-old Olympia, said she was drawn to Zigazoo because it was designed specifically for kids, rather than retrofitting a product made for adults."Existing social media sites were not necessarily designed with young children in mind and require parental supervision to make sure kids only consume content intended for their age group," Williams told CNN Business in an email. "Kids-first platforms like Zigazoo are important because safety is in their DNA and content is specifically developed to meet children's social and emotional needs."Zigazoo co-founders Zak and Leah Ringelstein, former elementary school teachers, created the app in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic after struggling to find interactive, engaging content for their three young children."We know the highest level of thinking happens at creation, and we were watching our own kids zone out and binge on YouTube," Zak Ringelstein said. "We recognized that not only was there a lot of content that we would never select for our child to watch but that kids can and want to do more. They want to be with friends. They want to create, build, and interact."Leah Ringelstein said they started orchestrated challenges around the house for their kids, such as "Does it sink or float?" or hunting for items that start with each letter of the alphabet. With a background as tech entrepreneurs -- the Ringelsteins launched and sold Dropbox-for-education platform UClass to Renaissance Learning, a Google Capital Company, for an undisclosed sum in 2015 -- they folded these exercises into an app and made the traditionally passive experience of viewing videos into something creative and social.The app's challenges fall into various categories -- art, math, health and fitness, and more -- and come from its content partners. For example, a Netflix challenge features character Chico Bon Bon: Monkey With a Tool Belt demonstrating downhill acceleration with toy cars, while a Peanuts challenge highlights how Zigazoo users can help protect the planet for Earth Day.The app requires an adult over the age of 18 to sign up via a Facebook, Google or Apple account. Parents can then decide if they want their child's videos to be seen on the Zigazoo feed or set to private.Each video is run through a third-party professional moderation service; the company has posted 125,000 so far in 2021. Its moderators work during a 19 hour window 7 days a week to ensure videos stay on topic for each challenge, do not include personal information -- no last names or addresses -- language is clean and content is free of "shoving, throwing, anger, yelling, bullying, sarcasm, or sulking," according to its policy page. Videos that check these boxes appear on the app's made feed; those that do not are made private.Zigazoo is also part of the kidSAFE Seal Program, an independent safety certification service designed for children-friendly technologies.The app has earned high praise from nonprofit Common Sense Media, which makes tech recommendations for families. "It's really impossible to stress how favorable and critical this approach is," said Christine Elgersma, senior editor of social media and learning apps at Common Sense. "If all social media had been designed with the notion that kids might use it, we'd be in a very different place today. Instead, we're playing catch-up and trying to put bandaids on issues that perhaps could have been avoided if initial design and launch placed kids and teens at the center."As Zigazoo grows through word of mouth, it has also fallen into the hands of celebrity parents -- including Rutler and his partner, singer Christina Aguilera -- whose 6-year-old daughter consumes videos on the app. "There's nothing else out there like this at all in the kids education space," said Rutler on why he wanted to invest. "I didn't really want my daughter to be spending time on some of the we found early on in the pandemic. I love that there are more exciting options now."Elergsma believes existing social media platforms and other apps for kids can look to Zigazoo as an example of how to offer a social yet safe place for children to be online."Kids aren't messaging each other, responding to lots of notifications, trying to get 'Zigazoo famous,' shop within the app, meet strangers, or doing any of the other things that make TikTok popular," Elergsma said. "Because Zigazoo encourages offscreen exploration and learning and then allows kids to show what they discovered, it strikes a great balance. It's absolutely okay for kids to be on apps like this."

A young boy named Dawson leans back in a white rocking chair on a balcony: "I bought some rocks from Home Depot and we just painted them. Let me show you over here."

He points to his collection; there's a blue rock with orange stars and another with a flower. A few seconds later, the video carousel switches to another clip. This time it's a girl named Avery who pops a few quarters into her gumball machine and tells her 97 subscribers, "It's blue! I guessed right."

If not for the tiny voices and faces, you might think you've fallen down a TikTok rabbit hole. But this is the world of Zigazoo, a social media app for kids ages three to 12.

The short-form video platform launched last summer with a mission to develop healthy social media and streaming habits at an early age. It lets kids browse or participate in 30-second video challenges or activities created by zoos, museums, teachers, musicians and TV studios, encouraging them to answer questions such as "What's on your mind?" or "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Kids can then share recorded responses with their Zigazoo friends or its network of 120,000 subscribers. There's singing, dancing and pet show-and-tells.

At a time when Facebook faces backlash for reportedly working on a kids version of Instagram, with advocacy groups citing excessive time on devices and social media as a main concern, Zigazoo is attracting positive attention. The company said the platform has grown by about 100% since the beginning of 2021 and has had 20 million video views to date -- two-thirds of that occurring in 2021.

File video: Children could be at risk of online predators through virtual learning, FBI says

On Thursday, the company announced a $4 million round of funding led by MaC Venture Capital, and a handful of celebrity investors, including Jimmy Kimmel, Serena Williams through her venture capital firm Serena Ventures, and Matthew Rutler, investor and head of talent at MasterClass.

Williams, a serial tech investor and mother to 3-year-old Olympia, said she was drawn to Zigazoo because it was designed specifically for kids, rather than retrofitting a product made for adults.

"Existing social media sites were not necessarily designed with young children in mind and require parental supervision to make sure kids only consume content intended for their age group," Williams told CNN Business in an email. "Kids-first platforms like Zigazoo are important because safety is in their DNA and content is specifically developed to meet children's social and emotional needs."

Zigazoo co-founders Zak and Leah Ringelstein, former elementary school teachers, created the app in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic after struggling to find interactive, engaging content for their three young children.

"We know the highest level of thinking happens at creation, and we were watching our own kids zone out and binge on YouTube," Zak Ringelstein said. "We recognized that not only was there a lot of content that we would never select for our child to watch but that kids can and want to do more. They want to be with friends. They want to create, build, and interact."

Leah Ringelstein said they started orchestrated challenges around the house for their kids, such as "Does it sink or float?" or hunting for items that start with each letter of the alphabet. With a background as tech entrepreneurs -- the Ringelsteins launched and sold Dropbox-for-education platform UClass to Renaissance Learning, a Google Capital Company, for an undisclosed sum in 2015 -- they folded these exercises into an app and made the traditionally passive experience of viewing videos into something creative and social.

The app's challenges fall into various categories -- art, math, health and fitness, and more -- and come from its content partners. For example, a Netflix challenge features character Chico Bon Bon: Monkey With a Tool Belt demonstrating downhill acceleration with toy cars, while a Peanuts challenge highlights how Zigazoo users can help protect the planet for Earth Day.

The app requires an adult over the age of 18 to sign up via a Facebook, Google or Apple account. Parents can then decide if they want their child's videos to be seen on the Zigazoo feed or set to private.

Each video is run through a third-party professional moderation service; the company has posted 125,000 so far in 2021. Its moderators work during a 19 hour window 7 days a week to ensure videos stay on topic for each challenge, do not include personal information -- no last names or addresses -- language is clean and content is free of "shoving, throwing, anger, yelling, bullying, sarcasm, or sulking," according to its policy page. Videos that check these boxes appear on the app's made feed; those that do not are made private.

Zigazoo is also part of the kidSAFE Seal Program, an independent safety certification service designed for children-friendly technologies.

The app has earned high praise from nonprofit Common Sense Media, which makes tech recommendations for families. "It's really impossible to stress how favorable and critical this approach is," said Christine Elgersma, senior editor of social media and learning apps at Common Sense. "If all social media had been designed with the notion that kids might use it, we'd be in a very different place today. Instead, we're playing catch-up and trying to put bandaids on issues that perhaps could have been avoided if initial design and launch placed kids and teens at the center."

As Zigazoo grows through word of mouth, it has also fallen into the hands of celebrity parents -- including Rutler and his partner, singer Christina Aguilera -- whose 6-year-old daughter consumes videos on the app. "There's nothing else out there like this at all in the kids education space," said Rutler on why he wanted to invest. "I didn't really want my daughter to be spending time on some of the [apps] we found early on in the pandemic. I love that there are more exciting options now."

Elergsma believes existing social media platforms and other apps for kids can look to Zigazoo as an example of how to offer a social yet safe place for children to be online.

"Kids aren't messaging each other, responding to lots of notifications, trying to get 'Zigazoo famous,' shop within the app, meet strangers, or doing any of the other things that make TikTok popular," Elergsma said. "Because Zigazoo encourages offscreen exploration and learning and then allows kids to show what they discovered, it strikes a great balance. It's absolutely okay for kids to be on apps like this."

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'Safety is in their DNA': This social media app is geared toward kids and learning - WESH Orlando