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A new research project at South Dakota State University looks at growing rye for biomass as part of a corn and soybean rotation.

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South Dakota State University researchers Kuo-Liang "Matt" Chang and Soo Hyun Cho study the factors driving farm management decisions — including the crucial decision to pass the farm operation to a younger generation.

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South Dakota State University aquaculture research shows soy can provide high-performance perch feed. SDSU professor Michael Brown’s latest work finds that some diets using soy protein concentrates, or SPC, perform as well as fishmeal-based diets.

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Research published Aug. 12 in the prestigious journal Science sheds light on free-market style cooperation between plants and fungi in what is arguably the most important symbiosis on Earth. The groundbreaking study helps explain how plants were able to colonize the land in Earth’s distant past, and what mechanisms stabilize cooperation between plants and fungi in the arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis.

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South Dakota State University is partnering with animal health leader Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Inc. to develop a new technology to protect pigs against a deadly form of E. coli.

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Rural landscapes of the future might have pyrolysis plants instead of grain elevators on every horizon —processing centers where farmers would bring bulky crops such as switchgrass to be made into bio-oil. New research looks at bio-oil and a potentially beneficial co-product called biochar.

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Humans may move one step closer to colonizing space thanks to a new research project that NASA is funding. It looks at ways to use cyanobacteria to make energy-dense fuels and high-value chemicals, oxygen, and cleansed water directly from carbon dioxide, sunlight, and wastewater.

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The Sun Grant BioWeb, an online resource that makes information available about bioenergy and other plant-based products from biomass, is reaching out to K-12 teachers who teach the next generation of consumers and scientists.

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Agricultural producers and waterfowl will benefit from a project at South Dakota State University that uses an innovative plant-breeding technique to shave perhaps two years off the time needed to produce winter wheat varieties for farmers in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America.

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A team of undergraduate computer scientists and their professor at South Dakota State University are building software to protect people in Africa and North America from mosquito-borne illnesses.

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Soybean growers in Argentina have something in common with their counterparts in some areas of the northern United States: Problems with a plant disease called northern stem canker.

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Agricultural land values are booming again in the Northern Great Plains, if a South Dakota study is any indication. The latest study from South Dakota State University economists suggests South Dakota land values charted a 16.5 percent increase in 2010-2011.

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An invention by a South Dakota State University engineer could improve alternative energy technologies by making it easier for scientists to test new devices. Assistant professor Mahdi Farrokh Baroughi developed a multivariable photovoltaic measurement system.

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SDSU professor Billy Fuller’s peers in the Upper Midwest have voted him president-elect of the North Central Branch of the Entomological Society of America. He will begin important administrative duties this year and will serve as president of the regional organization in 2012.

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Plant science professor Sharon Clay breaks ground literally every growing season when she begins a new set of studies of how weeds interfere with crop growth, reduce yield, and compete for nutrients, water and sunlight. This year she has broken ground in a different way — as the first woman ever chosen as president-elect of the American Society of Agronomy.

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Land-grant university scientists in the Northern Plains states are developing applications to make it easier to diagnose insect and crop disease problems in the field. The Northern Plains Integrated Pest Management Guide is a work in progress that is taking shape at the project Web site, www.npipm.org

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South Dakota State University has released soybean germplasm lines to help plant breeders elsewhere incorporate desirable qualities such as high protein and low linolenic acid into their own soybean varieties.

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Research by a South Dakota State University scientist and his colleagues elsewhere could make it safer to transfer information over mobile devices such as cell phones while conserving battery power. Researcher Wei Wang said those would be among the benefits from using a proposed new selective encryption technique to protect the most important content in streaming video over wireless networks.

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Pretreating bulky biomass feedstocks to make them more compact as a first step toward making biofuels may require less energy at the front end than scientists had thought. That’s the good news thus far from a $1.1 million study funded largely by the North Central Sun Grant Center at South Dakota State University.

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A South Dakota State University researcher is using museum collections to assemble a metrics database on perhaps 60,000 duck eggs representing at least 40 species and subspecies of ducks found in North America. What she learns could ultimately add new knowledge about how waterfowl respond to climate cycles and long-term climate change.

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An Australian publishing company’s work with an American scholar and her colleagues in other countries has led to a first-of-its-kind history of Christianity that pays close attention to how Christianity developed differently around the globe.

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A first-of-its-kind study of canola oil finds that it reduces the size and incidence of colon tumors in laboratory animals, a South Dakota State University scientist says. The research suggests using canola oil in household cooking may protect against colon cancer development.

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Four research fellowships awarded to SDSU chemistry students could help generate new knowledge to keep soldiers and civilians safe from cyanide exposure.

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Far-sighted data policy and cloud computing are leading to the “democratization of satellite mapping,” one expert says — and the payoff will be wider access to information about the earth via platforms such as the new Google Earth Engine, a planetary-scale platform for environmental data and analysis.

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Crafting oat varieties suitable for horses and other livestock is priority for plant breeders at South Dakota State University. But horses are having to make room at the trough for humans as scientists continue to learn more about the health benefits of oats in human diets.

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A fresh look at the safety systems for current and future nuclear power plants may be the silver lining in the current crisis involving nuclear reactors damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan. Physicist Robert J. McTaggart, the coordinator of nuclear education at South Dakota State University, is available to discuss the safety and future design considerations of nuclear power plants.

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A NASA grant of $1,950,135 funds a three-year study on whether climate change could be affecting the way fire behaves. Researchers will analyze satellite data, as well as historical climate and fire data, for the entire continent of Australia, the lower 48 states in North America, and the Amazon region in South America.

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The first rough draft of a “genetic road map” of the biomass crop, prairie cordgrass, is giving scientists an inside look at the genes of one of the crops that may help produce the next generation of biofuels.

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A student’s scholarship-winning project at South Dakota State University may help scientists better understand how grapes and other plants respond to drought. The study could pay off in better production as plant breeders develop varieties for regions facing increased drought stress due to climate change.

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Citi Community Development, part of the Citi family of businesses, supports an innovative Academic Success Program at South Dakota State University. The program is designed to help students who have been re-admitted to SDSU following suspension due to low academic achievement.

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Clinical trials started in December 2010 to determine how well an anti-obesity compound derived from a Chinese herb works in humans. South Dakota State University researcher Gareth Davies, the scientific director for the Avera Institute for Human Behavioral Genetics in Sioux Falls, said collaborators from SDSU and Avera have published several articles about the compound, which they call AIHBG-10.

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A grant of about $1.8 million over five years will help scientists better understand congestive heart failure, a condition that affects 5.7 million Americans annually. The research could supply new knowledge about heart failure that could lead to new treatment strategies.

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South Dakota State University has a major role in a $10 million project to deliver alternative power technologies to help the U.S. military supply power to units in the field. The three-year project began in May 2009.

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The chief consultant for an important new work about the sea spent the greater part of his career at landlocked South Dakota State University, about as far from any ocean as you can get in North America. The easy explanation is that Distinguished Professor Emeritus Charles "Fritz" Gritzner is a prolific writer about geography.

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Scientists are learning more about the life stages and biology of an insect that may compete with humans for the energy crops of the future — the insect some scientists are calling the switchgrass moth.

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A major grant to South Dakota State University will help train rehabilitation counselors who can help people with disabilities find places within the workforce. The grant puts a special emphasis on training for counselors who can help veterans returning from war. It provides $749,000 over a five-year period to allow SDSU to support master’s degree students in the program with funds for tuition and fees.

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Using a social networking platform such as Twitter as a tool in university courses can increase student engagement and boost grades. That’s the conclusion of a study involving university students published Nov. 12, 2010, in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning.

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Controlling malaria in part of Africa may become easier thanks to an international partnership between U.S. researchers and colleagues in Ethiopia that uses new tools to monitor risk.

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South Dakota State University has won a Defense contract to evaluate U.S. veterinary diagnostic laboratories’ efforts to keep disease-causing microbes and toxins safely inside the labs.

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The Missouri River needs a flow of sediment, not just water, to stay healthy, and regulatory agencies and scientists need to do a better job of gathering and understanding information about that process.

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They’ll drive for miles and miles across the rolling prairies of South Dakota to pool their thoughts with others concerned about the future of their rural communities, and to probe for solutions. A group of South Dakota State University professors and Cooperative Extension community developers said that seems to be the effect that a series of book discussions around the state is having as rural people meet to discuss the ideas in “Hollowing out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means for America.” Authors Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, a husband and wife team of sociologists, wrote the book after conducting a community study in Ellis, Iowa.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $43,809 in funding for South Dakota State University to plan for the development of a sustainable organic tribal bison production system.

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South Dakota State University researchers have demonstrated for the first time that a plant-derived compound used to treat nicotine addiction also has significant effects against alcohol addiction.

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Climate change in the Prairie Pothole Region poses problems for wetland-dependent organisms such as ducks, but farmers could help ease the impact by the way they farm.

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More than 100 years after an explorer first brought yellow-flowered alfalfa from Siberia to North America, South Dakota State University scientists are exploring one of his century-old ideas: use yellow-flowered alfalfa to boost the nutrition in semiarid grasslands.

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South Dakota State University researchers are using the tools of spatial analysis to explore nationwide data for insights on what influences obesity.

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South Dakota State University research is exploring a “fusion strategy” for making improved vaccines to protect pigs and humans against some strains of E. coli. The SDSU researchers altered the toxins produced by a form of E. coli and genetically fused the non-poisonous “toxoid” to a protein known to cause an immune reaction. The resulting “fusion protein” could be used to develop a vaccine.

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South Dakota State University livestock research is trying to determine whether the genes cattle inherit help determine the way they respond to vaccinations.

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South Dakota State University research funded in part by the Environmental Protection Agency could lead to a cleaner, greener leather tanning industry.

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A prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award will help a South Dakota State University researcher build new high-performance organic solar cells with increased efficiency.