“This isn’t a knot,” says Dr. Matt Hedden, assistant professor of mathematics at Michigan State and a recent winner of the Sloan Research Fellowship.

He holds up a piece of string that’s been unraveled from a yo-yo, which he appears to keep handy for the purpose of demonstrating his research on knot theory.

In mathematical terms, one can call a regular, circular loop of string the “un-knot.” When you untie the ends and start twisting them around, that’s when things get complicated.

Hedden describes a set of tools mathematicians use to analyze complex knots and how his research advanced the field: “On the face, knot Floer homology looks very challenging to compute. What I was able to do was compute it effectively.”

What differentiates mathematics research from many of the other disciplines is that there’s not much to work with physically. Hedden doesn’t spend his time tying and untying tangled pieces of string.

“A lot of work gets done at coffee shops,” he says.

Because the research is so idea-based, it can be mentally exhausting. But that’s what Hedden was attracted to in the first place, what he calls “the mysteries of seeing the same object appear in very different contexts.”

Although some researchers crawl deep into their own heads and live a hermetic, academic life, Hedden describes himself as more of a talker. He works on several problems at once, and interacts with as many people as he can. This social, collaborative approach is what helps him look at ideas from different angles.

“It’s the process of coming back to a problem,” he says. Instead of being consumed by theory, he moves to other ideas and, upon returning to one that’s been left on the shelf, he often sees the problem in a new light. It’s the subconscious, he says, working in the background.

Working in the background is a good description of the life of a mathematics researcher, but honors like Hedden’s Sloan Fellowship give a welcome and humbling burst of recognition.

“It meant a lot to me that people in my field and in other disciplines think highly of me,” Hedden says of the award. “Mathematicians are some of the best people I’ve ever met.”

The support of the community, which has already helped him with his work, is something of a reward in itself, completing the circle.

Or, one might say, the un-knot.

Ever taken a timed, online quiz? They’re not fun. But if getting questions wrong really stresses you out, your brain might be exhibiting an especially strong negative signal. It’s called error related negativity (ERN), and Dr. Jason Moser in the Department of Psychology has linked it to anxiety.

In a study that made subjects play a fast, simple computer exercise like this one in which mistakes were frequent, Moser examined how people’s responses to making an error related to their personality. Participants who labeled themselves as anxious people generated a bigger signal.

“Their brain is kind of tired, doing more work because it’s worrying,” Moser said. “So when they’re doing this task and they make a mistake, their brain reacts more.”

What does this mean for anxious test-takers? If you put too much energy into worrying about your performance, you tire out part of your brain. That means it has to compensate by responding more aggressively to mistakes, making for a rather miserable experience.

Now that Moser and his colleagues have singled out a specific signal, they can work on developing ways to reduce it in people with anxiety disorders.

“The ERN is a trait vulnerability factor that you’re born with, and it increases the likelihood of you developing a disability later,” Moser said.

But just because you’re born with it doesn’t mean you can’t change it. “We just don’t have treatments that target it,” he said.

Not yet, anyway.

Moser describes some potential therapy exercises that may reduce anxiety. For example, researchers have shown that a game involving two faces — one angry, one neutral — can train individuals to pay less attention to negative images.

The game goes like this: The angry and neutral face flash on the screen. After a few seconds, the faces disappear, and a button appears behind one of them. The faster you click it, the more points you score.

People who exhibit anxiety tend to score more points when the button appears behind the angry face. This indicates that their brain is tuned to pay attention to negative emotions — not good if you’re trying to avoid stress.

If we change the game so that the button appears behind the neutral face more often, the player begins to pay more attention to the neutral face, since it’s more likely to earn them points when the button appears. In this way, the game can train people to steer away from negative emotions, thus potentially reducing their anxiety.

There’s a long way to go before this technology reaches the mainstream, but its prospects are sunny. Someday soon, we might be able to teach ourselves not to worry about exams at all.

Of course, that might be taking it too far.

Dr. Ruth Smith’s forensic chemistry lab doesn’t have heavy metal music blasting from the ceiling. It isn’t lit by weird blue lights or guarded by a retina scanner. There are no corpses in sight.

What one does notice upon entering are three cardboard boxes, painted white, with some odd-looking piping inside. First-year master’s student Drew DeJarnette explains that these are the beginnings of a model gas chromatography mass spectrometer (GCMS), being built for a demonstration at Chemistry Day.

Not what you’d expect from a crime lab? That’s because it isn’t — this is a chemistry lab, and the students here are researching new techniques that will be used in future casework studies around the country. They’re the ones who make it all possible. Of course, they’re still learning.

Drew’s cardboard box GCMS is in the teaching lab, where Dr. Smith teaches graduate classes on trace evidence and controlled substance analysis. In the next room over is where the magic happens.

Here we see the real GCMS, a bulky machine used in separating sample mixtures and determining chemical composition. It does mass spectrometry, which, in essence, smashes molecules into tiny fragments that are characteristic of the compound and can be used to confirm its identity.

The GCMS is useful for drug analysis, toxicology and categorizing ignitable liquids — areas of research that make it possible for crime labs to analyze important evidence.

Karlie McManaman, a second-year Master’s student, explains how her study of impurity profiling in ecstasy tablets makes it possible for police to follow drug trafficking. By extracting specific chemical impurities from the drug, it can be possible to trace a confiscated tablet back to an individual lab. That’s because labs have begun to synthesize ecstasy in a variety of ways: “Now they’ll add anything to it,” Karlie says, listing caffeine as a common additive to MDMA, which is the main component of ecstasy.

Here in the lab, it’s not all chemistry all the time. Because MSU’s forensic science program is relatively small, the students have made their own community. “We have little social outings,” says Karlie. They’re going apple picking over the weekend.

But when it comes down to it, they love what they do. Karlie wants to work in a crime lab after she gets her master’s. As for Drew, who’s just entering the program, he says: “We’ll see.” Wherever they end up, the research they’ve done in Dr. Smith’s lab will undoubtedly be an asset, and the contributions they’re making to the field will be utilized in crime labs in the years to come.

Dr. Gemma Reguera has received a lot of attention lately for her breakthrough work with bioremediation technology. However, she says her motivation derives from the science itself, not for the recognition.

“Many people love the publicity, but we are overwhelmed by it,” she said of her team in the MSU Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. “There’s a narcissistic nature to some scientists.”

But not to Reguera: She chooses her projects based on their relevance to large-scale problems. One of those is the accumulation of toxic nuclear waste — a timely issue, indeed, especially after the recent disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

“What people don’t realize is the U.S. in particular has a terrible legacy from the Cold War era — vast amounts of subsurface waters and sediments contaminated with uranium,” she said. “They come from places where uranium mines were actively exploited: milling sites, uranium processing sites. You have to see it to believe it.”

The Oak Ridge Field Research Center in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is one such site. A groundwater plume contains toxic contaminants from waste disposal pools that have been stagnating for decades.

“They had to close everything down in 1988,” Reguera said. “They cap it. You know what cap means — they build a parking lot.

“What happened underneath, you can imagine.”

Reguera’s work with bacteria might hold the key to cleaning up sites like the one in Oak Ridge. She and her team have developed technology based on the respiration habits of Geobacter sulfurreducens. These bacteria use hair-like appendages called nanowires to neutralize radioactive uranium.

Reguera has dedicated more than five years to this research, and she says seeing the results outside of the lab makes it all worthwhile.

“There are many environmental processes, but we try to select the ones that have the most potential to develop a new technology — something transformative, translational,” she said. “You really have to be smart at what to select.”

Talking to Reguera, it becomes clear that, as a researcher, her time in the sun is brief. It takes countless hours in the lab to produce results worth implementing elsewhere, and that’s why it’s important both to choose a problem worth studying and to assemble a team worth working with.

“My priority is my people,” she said.

A new project in the works at Reguera’s lab involves studying organisms that sequester carbon, which may have an effect on controlling greenhouse gases.

“In ten years, that one may have evolved and matured,” Reguera said. For now, she’s still just getting started.

If you’ve ever taken medicine when you were sick, or learned about dinosaurs, or crossed a bridge, or traveled to the moon —and if you can say yes to that last one, please share your story in the comments as I’m sure it’s worth hearing — then you’ve benefited from somebody else’s research.

In fact, virtually every aspect of our modern lives has been studied, tested, and improved by scientists and engineers. These people spend years, lifetimes in some cases, solving problems and expanding general knowledge. They are the gears in the machine of progress.

And, for the most part, they are invisible.

This blog seeks to change that. Our research community at MSU is one of the most illustrious and expansive in the world, and discoveries are made on this campus every day that shape the way we think and live. In every academic discipline, researchers of all levels and backgrounds toil away in dim laboratories and libraries with the hopes of achieving one of these great discoveries. This blog will endeavor to meet some of these hardworking people and shed light not only on their work, but on who they are.

Each post will focus on a different project. Because of the vastness of the research occurring here at MSU, one cannot hope to meet every professor and student so engaged, but the blog will cover as many areas as possible — from the engineering and history, to chemistry and psychology, and all that lie between.

So join me, take part in this brave journey of discovery, and maybe you’ll learn something worthwhile. If you’re very lucky, you might just be inspired to make some discoveries of your own.

Why, you might even end up on the moon. (Or, more likely, sending some sort of space probe. But hey—isn’t the satisfaction just the same?)