The fungus Candida albicans is found in the gastrointestinal tract of about half of healthy adults with little if any effect, yet it also causes an oft-fatal blood infection among patients with compromised immune systems, including those with HIV/AIDS. New research helps show how this fungus gets the flexibility to live in these vastly different environments. The researchers, including Shen-Huan Liang, a pathobiology Ph.D. student, found that patient samples of the fungus frequently lack one copy of a gene that serves as a vital master regulator. In the lab, these cells can regularly switch to having a different set of traits, or phenotype, by losing the other copy. Read more.

The Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Program presents its spring thesis show, The Good Person of Szechwan, directed by MFA directing student Addie Gorlin. It is a story about balancing moral goodness and monetary success. “The most obvious question that this play asks is: can someone be good and still succeed in a capitalist society? I'm asking this question with a particular lens on gender,” says Gorlin. She cast an all-female production to call out the façade of masculinity these women are forced into in order to be taken seriously. Performances run February 28 through March 10 at the Pell Chafee Performance Center. Learn more.

Using an army of small satellites, researchers, including Ph.D. student Sarah Cooley, have shown that water levels in small lakes across northern Canada and Alaska are far more variable during the summer than previously thought. The findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, could have implications for how scientists calculate the natural greenhouse gas emissions from these northern lakes. “There’s been a lot of research on climate-driven changes in lake area, but it’s mainly focused on long-term changes,” said Sarah Cooley, a Ph.D. student at Brown University and the study’s lead author. “This is the first time that anyone has looked at fine-scale, short-term changes, and we found that there’s much more variability within a season than expected.” Read more. 

In a finding that will be useful in nanoscale engineering, Brown University researchers, including Engineering doctoral student Weilin Deng, have shown that miniscule differences in the roughness of surfaces can have important effects on how they stick together. In a series of papers, the latest of which is published in Scientific Reports, the researchers show that miniscule differences in the roughness of a surface can cause surprising changes in the way two surfaces adhere to each other. Certain levels of roughness, the studies show, can cause the surfaces to exert different amounts of force on each other depending upon whether they're being pushed together or pulled apart. Read more