The Vandal Theory

Question: What would you send to space? Meet Matthew Bernards (https://go.uidaho.edu/3ZS7I0Z), an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (https://go.uidaho.edu/41j7P6P) at University of Idaho and the director of the NASA Idaho Space Grant Consortium. He sends things to space to track how germs spread. And he explains how the search far and wide for answers tha...

Question: Nationally, where do you think Idaho ranks in the amount of water used for irrigation? Meet Karen Humes (bit.ly/3melehO), a professor in the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences (bit.ly/3UdU33k) at University of Idaho. Idaho uses water for irrigation and to make energy. Idaho also uses energy to pump irrigation water. Humes models this convoluted water, energy and irrigation nexus an...

Meet Helen Brown (http://bit.ly/3LVBSx7 ), a clinical associate professor in the Department of Movement Sciences (http://bit.ly/3TRb6YS) at University of Idaho, and Erich Seamon (http://bit.ly/3FQOt0z), a research scientist in the Institute for Modeling Collaboration and Innovation (http://bit.ly/3JPAg5n). They’ve teamed up to track and publish data about health trends in Idaho. Before their proje...

Question: What makes an outdoor experience satisfactory? Everyone has opinions about how Idaho’s natural resources should be used. Wallen teams with Idaho Fish and Game to figure out what those opinions are. Visit our website uidaho.edu/vandaltheory. Email us at vandaltheory@uidaho.edu. Learn about Idaho’s premier research university, University of Idaho, at uidaho.edu. More CNR Stories U of I and...

Question: How do you conserve energy in your home? Meet Damon Woods ( http://bit.ly/3mZRs0j), interim director of the Integrated Design Lab ( http://bit.ly/3ZKGev7) and a research professor at University of Idaho. Woods has helped state officials drill down which energy regulations — among hundreds on the books — protect Idahoans from wasting energy and money in their homes, businesses and elsewhe...

Question: What barriers stop people from getting help when it comes to mental health issues? Meet Adolfo Carmona, a second-year medical student at Idaho WWAMI (bit.ly/41y7yOk). Between his first and second year of medical school, Adolfo worked in Jerome, which has a large Latino population. He discusses the barriers to help many Latinos face when experiencing mental health challenges and how he is...

What role does creativity play in our lives? Meet Jason Dykstra (https://bit.ly/3Goymbl), a member of the band The Plagiarists and visiting faculty and director of University of Idaho’s Housing Clinic. The Boise law professor studies why creativity is important — in life, and in law. As shown by a creativity test designed for the Apollo space program, people begin life as creative geniuses, only t...

Question: When you imagine a farmer, what picture do you have in your head? Meet Colette DePhelps (bit.ly/3WzzXAA), an area extension educator specializing in community food systems for University of Idaho. As part of the Idaho Woman in Ag (bit.ly/3FJxbBN) project, DePhelps is interviewing and surveying Idaho’s female farmers — who earn $1 for every $2.50 earned by male counterparts — and identify...

What changes people’s minds about politics? Meet Florian Justwan (https://bit.ly/3YpXHsm), a professor of political science at University of Idaho, who studies political psychology. Drawing on years of research into how people process political information, Justwan shows we often rely on our identities and social networks to interpret new political data. People may not weigh new facts as heavily a...

Question: Just how much is Idaho growing? Meet Jaap Vos (https://bit.ly/3WdJYTU), a professor of planning and natural resources at University of Idaho, where he also serves as interim head of the Natural Resources and Society department. Vos used novel data on driver’s license registrations and turnovers to create a fuller picture of Idaho’s unprecedented rates of population change. More than one...

Question: What kind of tools come to mind when you think about wildlife conservation? Meet Lisette Waits (bit.ly/3GvWMQM), a distinguished professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Sciences (bit.ly/3GucDPQ) at University of Idaho. Whether she is tracking an endangered population of pygmy rabbits, watching wolves spread across the West, or trying to identify a tent-smashing bear, Waits uses...

Question: What makes up a glacier?   Meet Tim Bartholomaus (bit.ly/3fKY1Rc), an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences (bit.ly/3NJ7NzI) at University of Idaho. Glaciers are more than just an ice cube slowly sliding through the landscape. Bartholomaus is exploring why a glacier’s speed varies, how well glaciologists can predict glacier and icesheet melt, and the balls o...

Question: What makes someone believe in climate change? Meet Dilshani Sarathchandra (https://bit.ly/3zJNJr0) and Kristin Haltinner (https://bit.ly/3NCZd5n), sociology professors in the Department of Culture, Society and Justice (https://bit.ly/3T7VcHx) at University of Idaho. They delve deep into people’s beliefs about climate change, recounting lessons learned over hundreds of interviews for thei...

Question: Would you consider wildland firefighters athletes, and if so, what type of athlete would they be most like? Meet Heidi Holubetz (bit.ly/3W4UNbl), a master’s student in the Margaret Ritchie School of Family and Consumer Sciences (bit.ly/3f87n9m) at the University of Idaho. Wildland firefighters are considered tactical athletes who can burn 6,000 calories a day and require a solid nutritio...

“We took these sampling approaches from the lab and then we scaled it up to sampling in the field. And evolved from the ground-based sampling so that we could actually access higher-intensity fires. The types of fires that you wouldn’t want to stand your graduate student anywhere near. So, we developed a system that was lightweight enough that we could put it on a UAS, or a drone, an unmanned airc...

“A lot of the early studies that were done on the bacteria that are found in the vagina, they did sort of a biased sampling. They tended to study women who were white and not women of color, for example. And so, we did a study funded by the National Institutes of Health in which we collected samples from 400 different women, and they were from four different ethnic groups; there were Black women,...

“Texas has gone further than a lot of other states in deregulating their power system. So, if you look at Idaho Power or Avista, or a lot of the utilities in the Northwest, they own the generation, the transmission and the distribution lines that do the last little way to get to the customers. In Texas, the generators are mostly owned by third parties. Basically, they don’t have this obligation to...

“While on paper the number of licensed payday lenders dropped to zero, also on paper, the number of licensed pawnbrokers increased. The number of licensed small loan lenders increased. And surprisingly, the number of second mortgage lenders increased as well. So, this was maybe some cursory evidence that payday lenders were not extracting themselves from the market but maybe finding different aven...

“Bacteria are pretty interesting creatures, if you will. They will store inside their cell food that they consume in a polymer form, not unlike, in a way, how we store excess food as fat. If we recover the dead bacterial cells and refine this polymer, it’s a plastic. It’s a plastic very similar to polypropylene or polyethylene. In order for this process to work well, we need a lot of that particul...

“Immigrants are not only working in important sectors of the economy, but they’re also generating tax revenue. Immigrants paid about $221 million in state and local taxes in Idaho in 2018. So, I think the state owes something to this population that’s really doing so much for it. And my clinic is, of course, not even going to come close to meeting the need for immigrant legal services in the state...

Episode 4.2: Bert Baumgaertner — Vaccine Hesitancy “Moderates seem to be the most sensitive to changes in risk. So that’s to say, when risk is really low, the moderates behave similarly to conservatives in that not as many of them are willing to get vaccinated compared to democrats. But as you dial up the risk so that the risk is really, really high, then liberals and democrats are much more willi...

“You know…really the whole point of ECHO is to improve access for rural and underserved patients, and this is a way to do that. And, like I said earlier, it’s that ripple effect of it’s not just the patient whose case we review in the ECHO session, but it’s all the other patients who will receive better care as a result of what their provider learned in ECHO.” Meet Lachelle Smith (bit.ly/3rJz6hL),...

“It was so deeply appealing to people to be able to consider themselves a cowboy that they often didn’t care who was necessarily excluded on the other side. Even when they themselves had faced that exclusion previously, they were able to take that mythology, reshape it, yes, but still redeploy it as a way to say we belong but maybe other people don’t.” Meet Rebecca Scofield (bit.ly/2IBAx00), an as...

“From my honeypot research I’ve found that any new computer that connects to the internet, having never run any sort of service before, you’re discovered within an hour. Usually [after] about 30 minutes people start to connect to you with that tool that we call a ping. If you’re a high value target like the honeypots I’ve put up for infrastructure, within a day or two we start getting connection a...

“We do clearly have lakes where they haven’t had blooms and then recently, I’d say within the last 10 years, as part of the regular monitoring programs that occur, people have seen an increase or an occurrence of these blooms. Example in Idaho is Twin Lakes. Last year was the first time it had a toxic bloom in its history. So, people are naturally upset about that and very concerned in terms of wh...