2024 Year in Review

As 2024 comes to an end, the Iowa State University News Service team is looking back and sharing some of its favorite and more popular stories of the year. Click on each headline to read the full story.

A new course took 13 Iowa State students and their three instructors across "Tornado Alley" for eight days this summer. They found storms, collected data and shared information with national forecasters. It all could have been straight out of the movie "Twisters."

Iowa State celebrated a significant milestone in the advancement of the College of Veterinary Medicine's long-standing commitment to providing state-of-the-art diagnostic services in support of Iowa's $32.5 billion animal agriculture industry.

The Iowa DOT is supporting Iowa State engineers developing a snowplow navigation system designed to help snowplow drivers maintain their position in a lane. The project also will help drivers avoid collisions with snow-covered cars or debris in the roadway.

For five years, Iowa State has consistently ranked in the Top 15 of the Entrepreneurship Undergraduate rankings by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur. The rankings consider more than 40 data points including academic offerings, mentorship and experiential learning opportunities.

2024 marked 50 years of live music and events at the Maintenance Shop, the iconic club and performance space on the ground floor of ISU's Memorial Union. Music legends and theatrical productions have performed in the glow of the club's stained-glass window since 1974.

Researchers tested new nanoink and printing technologies on the "roller coaster" of NASA microgravity flights. They demonstrated that electronic circuits can be printed in zero gravity, which could lead to astronauts printing electric circuits for spacecraft and equipment repairs.

Studies suggest about 40-50% of our happiness is based on genetics while 10% is related to circumstances like income or appearance. That means the rest is something we can manage with practice, which was the goal of a new course.

Students in the foundational anatomy course for animal science department use virtual dissection to supplement their hands-on learning via more traditional methods, a technology that's common in medical and nursing school but a rare opportunity for animal science students.

A new study by researchers in the College of Veterinary Medicine helps explain why dairy cows infected by highly pathogenic avian influenza are shedding the virus in their milk. Their findings could help develop biosecurity measures aimed at slowing the spread of the illness.

A new IPA developed by students in the brewing science program will soon be available through a collaboration with Backpocket Brewing. The Iowa brewery challenged students to take what they learned in class and in the lab and apply it to a professional situation.

Researchers have discovered when and why inflammatory signaling affects the formation of blood stem cells in embryos, which will benefit efforts to develop patient-derived stem cell transfusions to treat blood disorders. It could eliminate the need for bone marrow transplants.

The Ada Hayden Herbarium - built in part by contributions from some of its most celebrated scholars - expanded when it absorbed the University of Northern Iowa's collection. It now holds more than 700,000 preserved plant, fungal and algal specimens for research and instruction. .

As part of a panel of 32 physicists, Iowa State's Amanda Weinstein helped set the priorities for the country's particle physics research agenda. The panel's plan will guide hundreds of millions in investments by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Over a typical two-year rotation of corn and soybeans, 40% of nitrous oxide emissions are in the fertilizer-free soybean year, according to new Iowa State research. Winter cover crops and planting soybeans earlier could reduce emissions by one-third while increasing yields.

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