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Counselors who are specially trained to provide adjustment services to people with disability help their clients find gainful employment.

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Energy generated by solar panels and wind turbines interfaces to the electricity grid using power electronic converters—but how will these converter-based and traditional-based control systems interact to ensure voltage and frequency stability?

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Delivering palliative care to rural, frontier areas is difficult, but the lack of infrastructure makes developing programs for three Northern Plains Indian tribes even more challenging.

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To address the shortage of health-care professionals in rural and underserved areas, nurse-researchers are helping rural clinics more fully utilize registered nurses in primary care and have expanded the South Dakota State University nursing curriculum to better prepare students to do just that.

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Fungicides can help prevent the lodging and yield loss that stem canker causes, but timing is crucial. A new disease-forecasting model that predicts stem canker risk can help.

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Soybean diseases caused by various species of Diaporthe pathogens are on the rise and scientists are identifying the pathogens behind this increase.

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An increased number of bat sightings in the fall coincide with young bat being encouraged to leave the nest and fend for themselves.

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Encouraging more high school students to pursue careers in agriculture—that’s the idea behind USDA iLEARN professional development workshops for science and ag teachers.

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Scientists and consumers recognize the cholesterol-lowering power of oats, but what few know is that most of the oats American milling companies use comes from Canada. To increase oats production in the Midwest, researchers are developing methods to speed up selection of breeding material to improve the nutritional and milling qualities of new oat varieties—that includes developing ways to increase beta-glucan.

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Setting and achieving goals related to income and education may improve the overall health of Native Americans--that’s the premise behind a new research project, We RISE—raising income, supporting education—targeting young mothers on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in north central South Dakota. Health disparities research typically controls for socioeconomic status in analyses, but this study looks changing those socioeconomic variables.

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Jumping up a 2-foot waterfall is an impossible task for small fish like minnows and shiners. Such an obstacle can inhibit their ability to feed and spawn upstream. But state and federal wildlife agencies may soon be able to install fish ladders on the downside side of culverts to prevent this from happening.

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Soybean roots are under attack from two culprits, a parasitic round worm called the soybean cyst nematode, feeds on the roots, and a fungal disease called sudden death syndrome, which inhibits root growth. Soybean fields affected by both feel the greatest impact on yields. Planting resistant varieties and rotating crops are essential.

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When it comes to reducing the number of walleye, anglers take a back seat to Mother Nature. That’s the one of the insights on harvest dynamics emerging from a research project to assess movement, mortality and the impact of anglers on walleye populations along the Missouri River from the Oahe Dam near Pierre, South Dakota, north to the Garrison Dam near Riverdale, North Dakota.

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Resistance, stability and flexibility training can improve balance and other functional movements for people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis—and behavior therapy may further improve their quality of life. That’s the premise of a study that builds on previous work suggesting that resistance and flexibility training improved balance and symmetry, which is of particular concern for those experiencing leg weakness.

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Plants share their carbohydrates with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi that colonize their roots and, in exchange, these fungi provide their hosts with nitrogen and phosphorous. By exploiting this relationship, scientists may be able to increase the biomass production of bioenergy crops and the yield of food crops and to reduce the required fertilizer inputs. This could improve the environmental sustainability of agricultural production systems according to professor Heike Bücking of South Dakota State University.

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Researchers have found antibodies to the newly discovered influenza D virus in pigs, cattle, horses, goats and sheep, but not poultry. South Dakota State University doctoral student Chithra Sreenivasan has proven that the guinea pig can be used as an animal model and is developing a way to study the virus in living cells—trachea and lung epithelial cells from swine and cattle.

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An economic analysis of data gathered from survey respondents who bought South Dakota hunting licenses showed that more than $37.5 million was generated through those who hunted on land set aside through Conservation Reserve Program funding. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency research shows the economic contribution, impacts and benefits from hunting that occurs on CRP lands and calculates the effect of a 50 percent reduction in CRP acres.

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“Breeding is a numbers game—the more combinations we test, the more likely we are to identify a superior plant,” said winter wheat breeder Sunish Sehgal. He develops more than 500 new genetic combinations each year to increase winter hardiness, yield and disease and drought resistance in South Dakota wheat varieties.

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“If you live in flammable countryside, you’ve got to work with fire. You can’t make it go away,” according to professor Mark Cochrane, a wildfire expert and senior scientist at the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence. That means moving from the notion that fires are unnatural and toward a managed approach that involves reintegrating fire as a vital landscape process and building communities that are resilient to fire.

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Changing crop prices was the No. 1 factor that farmers in the Prairie Pothole region of eastern South Dakota and southeastern North Dakota considered when deciding whether or not to convert grassland to cropland. Of the 1,026 producers who responded to the 2015 Farmland Decision Survey, 40 percent had converted some native or tame grassland to cropland in the last 10 years.

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Making milk powder seems simple, but it’s not. Creamer must dissolve very quickly in hot coffee, but powder density is critical for infant formula. Dairy scientists from South Dakota State University and chemical engineers from Monash University in Australia are using a single-droplet spray dryer and computation fluid dynamics modeling to determine the drying parameters needed to produce powders with those specific properties.

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A newly discovered insect species in prairie cordgrass may explain why increasing seed production has been so difficult, according to South Dakota State University entomologist Paul J. Johnson, a professor in the plant science department. The larvae feed on the developing seed within the plant. This is part of U.S. Department of Agriculture supported research to develop native grasses as a source of biobased transportation fuels.

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Roasted vegetables, fruit salads and spinach smoothies can form the basis for a healthy meal and provide a chance to connect as a family. These are insights that 9- and 10-year-olds and their caregivers in South Dakota gained through iCook, a multi-state U.S. Department of Agricultural project to increase culinary skills, family mealtime and physical activity as a means of preventing childhood obesity.

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Three Lakota elders are discussing advanced care planning and wills with their peers on Pine Ridge and other South Dakota reservations through an outreach project done in collaboration with a South Dakota State University nurse-researcher. The group developed a Lakota-specific advanced directive brochure and received training to be advance directive coaches. What they’ve done could impact Native American nationwide.

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“Diversity and inclusion are not just about ethnicity,” said assistant education professor Christine Nganga, citing gender, abilities and disabilities, social and economic class and religion in addition to race. “It’s the interplay of all these markers and how to cater to students’ diverse needs in the classroom.” She has quadrupled the enrollment in the ESL certification program at South Dakota State University and emphasizes social justice, equity and inclusion in her scholarly work.

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A novel magnetic semiconductor material that is an alloy of cobalt, iron, chromium and aluminum in which part of the aluminum was replaced with silicon may help reduce the power needed to store data in the computer memory. Researchers from the South Dakota State University Physics Materials and Nano-Science Lab are collaborating with the nano-magnetic group at the Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Sparking interest in engineering among Native American youngsters—that’s the goal of a the National Science Foundations’ Pre-Engineering Education Collaborative, but as those involved will tell you, it’s a tough task. Two South Dakota State University researchers decided to find out why college-age Native American students opted for careers in social sciences and nursing rather than engineering.

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Rehabilitation counselors can help clients with physical or mental disabilities—or both, as is often the case—find employment and live independently, according to South Dakota State University professor Alan Davis. October is National Disability Employment Awareness month.

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A low-cost method of removing phosphates from tile drainage water developed at South Dakota State University may help protect lakes and streams. Assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Guanghui Hua is using steel byproducts to trap phosphates in simulated tile drainage water. He collaborates with assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering and SDSU Extension water management engineer Chris Hay, who has been testing woodchip bioreactors since 2011. Hay envisions installing a steel-containing cartridge as an add-on to nitrate-capturing bioreactors.

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Wheat farmers in Kazakhstan lose anywhere from from 10 percent to as much as 50 percent of their wheat crop due to tan spot and Septoria leaf blotch. Research scientist Zagipa Sapakhova of the Institute of Plant Biology and Biotechnology will screen new wheat varieties to improve resistance to these common fungal diseases, thanks to techniques she learned at South Dakota State University.

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Patients suffering from aneurysms that extend from their chest into their groin may be helped by a new stent graft, thanks to collaboration between Sanford Health and South Dakota State University. Mechanical engineering associate professor Stephen Gent’s fluid flow modeling “helped validate that the configuration is delivering more well developed blood flow with the design,” according to Sanford Health vascular surgeon Pat Kelly.

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The French have spent centuries developing grapes with the unique flavor and character of Burgundy region wines. Cold-climate grape producers are counting on science to help shorten that process. Plant scientists Anne Fennell and Rhoda Burrows from South Dakota State University are part of the research team helping cold-climate grape growers carve a niche in the American wine industry through two U.S Department of Agriculture projects.

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A survey of 324 multiunit owners/operators in South Dakota showed that adopting those policies reduced maintenance costs while improving safety. The research was a collaborative project involving nursing researchers at South Dakota State University and the South Dakota Department of Health. State tobacco control officials have developed materials to help more apartment owners institute voluntary smoke-free policies.

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