News Service

Setbacks are to be expected when pursuing a goal, whether you are trying to lose weight or save money. The challenge is getting back on track and not giving up after a difficulty or crisis, says an Iowa State marketing professor working on practical ways to help people stick to health-related goals.

A key component of CYstarters is its weekly accountability sessions, giving the student participants an opportunity to discuss what they’ve worked on the past week, their plans for the upcoming week and their “pains and gains.” The startups receive valuable input from CYstarters staff, mentors and their peers.

The sustainable environments interdisciplinary graduate program’s floating islands research project has returned to Iowa State University’s Lake LaVerne for the first summer since 2015. While the project still measures nutrient uptake from the water, this year’s research adds pollinator plants to determine if floating islands could also help threatened insects such as bees and butterflies.

To help startups move from concept to launch, CYstarters provides educational workshops on topics ranging from focus groups to patent law to digital marketing. Entrepreneurs learn the ins and outs of starting a business and have access to resources that might otherwise be out of reach.

A new federally funded center of excellence led by Iowa State University scientists will analyze various structures and mechanisms in the swine genome with the goal of allowing pork producers to predict with greater accuracy the traits in their herds. The institute will include personnel at Iowa State, Michigan State, the University of California at Davis, and the USDA Agriculture Research Service.

Scientists have identified patterns in how and when sorghum plants flower that could help plant breeders and growers predict other important traits in a wide range of environments and geographic regions. The research team created an index based on photothermal time, a crucial phase in a plant’s development when it processes the environmental cues of sunlight and temperature. The research looked at sorghum, but the scientists believe the same method could be applied to a range of plants, including other crops.

Art historian April Eisman, an Iowa State University associate professor of art and visual culture, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to spend the 2018-2019 academic year doing research in Germany on artist Angela Hampel, one of former East Germany's most successful and outspoken artists.

Iowa State University ranks No. 83 in the world in the number of patents granted in the United States last year, according to a list released this week by the National Academy of Inventors and Intellectual Property Owners Association.