The Journal of Young Investigators: An Undergraduate, Peer-Reviewed Science Journal

The Springtime Blues: Understanding Seasonal Allergies

By Neil Majithia
Biology/Chemistry, Virginia Commonwealth University

When T.S. Eliot wrote the opening to The Waste Land, his primary intention was to capture the disillusionment of the post-World War I generation. For seasonal-allergy sufferers, however, a line such as “April is the cruellest month…” must take on a dual meaning. Indeed, sometimes the most annoying symptoms are also the most harrowing, so for those 40 million Americans who bear runny noses and watery eyes through the spring and into the summer, there might as well be a war going on in the cellula ...More »

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The Dawn of the Living, Talking Robots

Bullseye. That is the pattern that you would see if you looked onto the lawn of E.coli covering the petri dish from the labs of Frances Arnold and Ron Weiss. What is actually going on between the cells on the petri dish is even stranger: the bacteria are “telling” each other to form the bullseye. These bacterial cells were successfully programmed to communicate with each other in order to form a color pattern specified by the researcher. In effect, the bacteria have been made into microscopi ...More »