Latest news with #WorcesterStateUniversity
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'Truly magical': The 17-year cicada is ready to rock
Woo! Science is a column of science news and newsmakers in Worcester and the region. Got a science news idea? Email Margaret Smith at msmith@ With their bright red eyes and dapper, red-veined wings, the males are truly putting on the ritz, but is it enough to dress to impress? Maybe as Cass Elliot once sang, "Words of love, soft and tender, won't win a girl's heart anymore." Nevertheless, they'll be ready to sing loud, sing proud, and even if humans hear a reedy, frantic cacophony, remember: there's lots of different love languages. We can only be talking about one spectacular insect, and one event: the periodic, 17-year emergence of cicadas. And we as humans are dazzled, delighted, but sometimes confused and maybe a little worried, as we so often are when lots and lots of insects show up all at once. The so-called periodical cicada is emerging now on parts of Cape Cod and the southeastern part of the state, said Tawny Simisky, entomologist with UMass Extension's Landscape, Nursery and Urban Forestry Program. Simisky specializes in insects that may damage trees and shrubs, but not to fear as we shall see, cicadas that depend on trees also give back. "There is a lot of anticipation about the periodical cicadas in Massachusetts," said Simisky. Dubbed "Brood XIV, " or "Brood 14," by means of record-keeping parlance, Simisky said, "These are all cicadas in a given geographic area, expected to emerge at the same time." The female cicada lays her eggs in the stems or twigs of trees, by means of an ovipositor, a sharp organ that can slice a hole in which the female can lay her eggs. And so, for 17 years, the young cicadas move from larval to nymph or adolescent phase, before emerging, ready to shed their juvenile skin, and carefully inflating their newfound, grownup wings. Simisky said, "We have folks reporting them coming up from beneath the ground in Eastern Sandwich, Mass., on May 17." This is when so-called exit holes appear in the ground, small and perfectly dime-sized. Where can you find them? "Some areas on Cape Cod, in Barnstable County, and possibly a much smaller area of Plymouth County," Simisky said. "This past Friday, prior to the long weekend, I went out there, and brought my entire family." Simisky returned with photos, including those of newly-emerged cicadas. If it seems like a curious career, spending most of your existence in the juvenile phase, emerging only for a short time in the hopes of finding a mate and passing on that cicada DNA, it puzzles scientists, too, but from a species survival standpoint, they say it makes sense. "We have hundreds of species of cicadas, but only nine species that do this periodicity thing," said Sebastián Vélez, entomologist and biology professor at Worcester State University. "It's all natural selection. There is something called 'stragglers.'" Some may emerge after 12 years, some at 14, some after 13 years, and in the case of the current emergence, 17 years. This may increase the odds of more cicadas surviving long enough to reproduce, and even if many get eaten by birds and other predators. Over time, there will simply be too many for hunters to eat so many of them that it jeopardizes the next generation. Another hypothesis, said Vélez, is that a lengthy period of living beneath the earth is a sensible adaptation from a time when glaciers are believed to have covered much of the region. "Neither of these two ideas are fool proof, and no one has been able to test it," said Vélez. In a time when invasive species have caused great damage to our forests, it's natural to have concerns about an insect that depends on trees. "The only harm they do is lay their eggs in the roots of trees. That weakens the tree. When the first molt comes out of the ground, they have a little straw that punctures a plant ... they tap into that, like a little straw. But, they don't harm crops. They won't kill your trees," said Vélez. And, they're not interested in your vegetable garden. "The nymphs of the periodical cicadas feet on tree roots, but there is no evidence that they negatively impact trees," Jennifer Forman Orth, environmental biologist of the state Department of Agricultural Resources. Orth said there is some evidence that in the long run, the cicadas may benefit trees, due to the nutrient cycling, as well as the shell left behind in the process of reaching the adult stage. And, after the cicada dies, it will enrich the soil, Orth said. Simisky agrees. "Actually, it makes the canopy of trees healthier over time. You can cover immature trees with bird nettings, with openings less than half an inch, and that will keep the adult cicadas from laying eggs in those small trees." Simisky said, "Adults laying eggs on mature, established trees, actually act like a pruning for them," Simisky added, "One side effect of having adult periodical cicadas above ground and in folks' yards, is trees like oak, apple, ash, birch, is the females will be laying their eggs in the small branches of these trees. It will cause some leaves to turn dry or brown. That is a natural process." The sound of the cicada is like a theme song of summer: that long, reedy hum on a hot, drowsy day. But how do they do that? They don't have vocal cords. And when the male sings, how does the female hear? Firstly, that sound is mostly associated with the so-called "dog day" cicadas, the ones that emerge every year, perhaps not as spectacular in appearance as their periodic relatives, but still making their presence known. "The cicadas that folks all across Massachusetts might be more familiar with are the annual 'dog day' cicadas," Simisky said. With dark brown, black or green features, and black eyes, "Their timing is a little bit different," with appearances in July or August. The male periodic cicadas tend to cluster in a group, and all try really, super hard to attract females by way of really loud sounds. Simisky said, "I can see how some people might be intimidated. Their singing can be loud. The cicada in eastern Massachusetts is one of the quieter cicadas. But when all the males are singing, they are quite loud." How do they do that, anyway? Simisky said, "They have organs on their bodies, called tymbals, on the first segment of their abdomen." Contracting these membranes produces the sound. If you've ever told someone, "You're as cute as a bug's ear," maybe it's time to say, "cute as a bug's typana." What? They're membranous organs that both males and females have, found on the underside of their abdomens, and which register sound. So, I'm that person at a party who, when the subject of insects come up, says without reserve, "All bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs." Bug is the informal name of everyone in the order, hemiptera, "half wing," basically, the bug club, to which cicadas have membership. By the way, they are edible, but perhaps that's best for a different party. This is maybe a good time to clear the air, as it were: we humans have a peculiar relationship to insects. Unless it's a butterfly, a ladybug (which is really a beetle), or a cute little cricket, something in our primordial brain wants to know: will these things bite, sting or eat me? And if they're plant eaters, are they going to lay waste to our crops? "We do have a natural insect against insects, spiders and snakes, and that makes sense," said Vélez. Because some insects do bite or sting, or carry pathogens, and some insects can devastate crops, and striking a balance is difficult. Simisky said from time to time, someone on social media postulates that those red eyes surely signify a demon in flight. But if anything, the cicada is a vulnerable creature in many ways. Climate change may bring temperature fluctuations that can confuse creatures, cicadas included. Orth said if a building is constructed over a site where cicada nymphs are lying, they may not be able to make that vertical tunnel to the surface, and instead have travel horizontally until they can find an opening. The cicada asks nothing from us, except to live out its life cycle without interference. "Maybe it's unique to me as an entomologist," said Simisky. "I enjoy seeing this insect. It's truly magical that they are only above ground every 17 years. It gives you a sense of the resilience of life on Planet Earth." Every cicada counts. If you find periodic cicadas in your neck of the woods, so to speak, you can reach out to the Department of Agricultural Resources' Brood XIV Project on iNaturalist. This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Woo! Science: Why cicadas will not go quietly
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Eye-popping gift from closed Central Mass. college will help school mission continue
Becker College, which closed in 2021, donated $13 million to the Greater Worcester Community Foundation for a new scholarship program. The donation went towards the creation of the Becker Scholarship Program, which includes the Becker Scholarship Fund and the Becker Global Public Service Award, the foundation announced on April 4. The Greater Worcester Community Foundation is a non-profit organization that awards scholarships to students across Worcester County. In 2024, the foundation awarded 428 scholarships to students, committing $1.6 million in one-time and multi-year awards, according to a press release on the organization's website. With the creation of the Becker Scholarship Fund, the foundation's annual scholarship award distribution will increase by at least $400,000, providing students with multi-year scholarships to cover the costs of tuition, room and board, books and academic materials and other eligible costs of college attendance, the press release reads. A total of $10.2 million has been allocated to the fund. 'This generous gift from Becker College is a transformational investment in Worcester County students,' said Pete Dunn, President & CEO of the Greater Worcester Community Foundation. 'We are honored to steward this fund and carry forward Becker College's legacy of opportunity and service.' The Becker Global Public Service Award, will provide a monetary award to support a humanitarian project to be developed and led by a rising or graduating college or university senior, the press release reads. A total of $2 million has been allocated for the award. 'Becker College was dedicated to preparing students for meaningful careers and service to the world,' said Christine Cassidy, board chair of Becker College. 'This gift ensures that commitment lives on. The Becker Scholarship Program is a lasting tribute to Becker College's mission and values, reaffirming that our top priority was, and always will be, the students.' Additionally, the gift from Becker College includes the transfer of $778,000 to the Grace S. Hampel Scholarship Fund. The fund prioritizes graduating seniors of Hoosac Valley High School who plan to attend college in Worcester County, the press release reads. Becker College closed because of enrollment and financial challenges, with the campuses in Worcester and Leicester having been sold off to the towns or developers. The college has also donated $274,212 to Mount Wachusett Community College for its veterinary technology program, expanding upon a previous $1.24 million donation made to Worcester State University. The Worcester State University donation was for the creation of endowed scholarships for nursing leadership and faculty development, as well as a new study abroad program for healthcare leadership. Worcester could have new school superintendent as soon as Thursday Central Mass. Regional Public Health Alliance to disband Missing boy rescued from chest-deep water by police dog in Milford Read the original article on MassLive.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Closed Central Mass. college makes ‘crucial' gift as one of its final acts
Becker College, which closed in 2021, is donating $274,212 to Mount Wachusett Community College for its veterinary technology program, expanding upon a $1.24 million donation to Worcester State University. The donation to the community college comes from the residual endowment assets of Becker and will 'contribute to the ongoing enhancement of the program's quality and support the academic and professional growth of students pursuing careers in veterinary technology,' the institution said. Read more: Could shuttered college campuses help solve the Mass. housing crisis? 'We are deeply grateful for this generous donation from the Becker College Endowment,' said Tara Novak, who is the director of veterinary technology at the community college. 'This gift will play a crucial role in ensuring that our students have access to the resources and training they need to succeed in their careers.' Becker College closed due to enrollment and financial challenges. Since then, the campuses in Worcester and Leicester have been sold off to the towns or to developers, largely developed into housing. Read more: Closing Central Mass. college makes stunning gift to nearby school Becker College also made a $1.24 million donation to Worcester State University to establish two endowed scholarships for nursing leadership and faculty development and a new study abroad program for healthcare leadership. The nursing scholarships will provide financial support to Worcester State nursing students in perpetuity and will provide faculty the ability to access advanced degrees and invest in professional growth. The study abroad program will allow nursing students to take week-long, immersive trips abroad to gain academic and clinical experience. The program will include support for the university's decade-long partnership with Atlantic Technical University in Donegal County, Ireland, for nursing study abroad. Harvard changes admissions policy, offering foreign students a 'backup plan' How Trump vs. Harvard is a page out of the Project 2025 playbook 'Games of chicken': Trump reversing foreign student legal status raises concerns Trump is threatening to block international students from Harvard. Is that legal? Could Trump's crackdown on foreign students exacerbate declining college enrollment? Read the original article on MassLive.
New York Times
01-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Overlooked No More: Maria W. Stewart, Trailblazing Voice for Black Women
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. One day in 1831, Maria W. Stewart walked into the Boston offices of the publisher William Lloyd Garrison with a manuscript in hand that she was hoping he would print in his recently launched newspaper, The Liberator. Garrison was a famous white abolitionist; Stewart was a 28-year-old former indentured servant. In her manuscript, a political manifesto, she recounted her upbringing and described the conditions for Black women in an oppressive America. She also argued for equal opportunity for Black Americans, and she did something no Black woman had done before: speak directly and publicly to other women, urging them to educate themselves, 'to promote and patronize each other' and, even more, 'to sue for your rights and privileges.' As the historian Kristin Waters, the author of 'Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought' (2022), told Worcester State University in 2022, Stewart was 'one of the very first writers to express what we would now call 'feminism.'' Garrison didn't hesitate to publish Stewart's 'Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,' as well as many more of her essays, in what would become America's pre-eminent abolitionist newspaper. Maria Miller was born on Sept. 4, 1803, in Connecticut, in either Hartford or Greenwich. Little is known of her parents, Lib and Caesar, but scholars believe that they had both likely been enslaved in Greenwich, and that they had achieved a measure of freedom by the time Maria was born. Maria (pronounced Mariah) was orphaned at age 5 and then, as she later recalled, 'bound out in a clergyman's family,' where she spent 10 years as a domestic servant. In her free time she studied books in the family's library, and she later attended Hartford's Sabbath schools. After her service ended, she moved to Boston, where she absorbed newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, sermons and speeches. 'My soul thirsted for knowledge,' she wrote, and this intense practice of self-education led her to become a writer. In an interview, Marilyn Richardson, who reintroduced Stewart's work in 1987 with the book 'Maria W. Stewart: America's First Black Woman Political Writer,' called her 'an autodidact of just stunning dimensions.' In the first essay she wrote, Stewart posited that white Americans 'have practiced headwork these 200 years, and we have done their drudgery.' 'How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?' she asked. Her answer: Pool community resources and build a high school so 'the higher branches of knowledge might be enjoyed by us.' She reminded readers that the Constitution 'hath made all men free and equal,' and she envisioned a world that went well beyond ending slavery, in which Black Americans could be business owners, educators and full participants in the nation's economy and civic institutions. Stewart began a second career as a public speaker and attracted paying audiences that were racially mixed and included both men and women. She used her platform to address domestic and global political issues: She denounced abolitionists who favored a gradual end to slavery and called out the hypocrisy of America's leaders for supporting Europe's independence revolutions while refusing to acknowledge the singular uprising in Haiti that in 1804 established a republic under Black self-rule. But she could be caustic, criticizing even her fellow Black Americans for failing to work hard enough. She remonstrated Black men for 'gambling and dancing' instead of becoming what she called 'men of eminence': statesmen, scientists, lawyers, philosophers. 'If you are men,' she goaded them, then convince white Americans 'that you possess the spirit of men.' Many in Stewart's audiences responded harshly, even her own circle of Boston friends, but Stewart continued to write and speak her mind. In 1826, she married James W. Stewart, a naval veteran of the War of 1812 who became a successful shipping agent in Boston, investing in whaling ventures and fitting out sailors and fishing vessels. They lived in the racially diverse North Slope of Beacon Hill, just steps away from the African Meeting House, which functioned as a community space, school and church. They had no children, and James Stewart died of heart failure in 1829. In the wake of this painful loss — along with an extended legal battle over James's estate, in which a white businessman forged the will, fraudulently naming himself executor and leaving her penniless — Stewart underwent a religious conversion. 'I made a public profession of my faith in Christ,' she wrote, and as Kristin Waters noted in her biography, she opened her mind 'to deep political truths.' Stewart's writings became heavily influenced by the Bible, and she further broke boundaries as a woman in a fundamentally patriarchal society by daring to commandeer the voice of its most foundational text to argue her case. In 1833, Stewart moved to New York and began a third career: as a teacher. She worked in the public schools, eventually rising to assistant principal of Colored School No. 3 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Though she had never received a formal education, she taught reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography and grammar. In 1835 she arranged for the publication of her speeches, essays and religious meditations as 'Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart'; it had an immediate influence. Within a year, according to the historian Marilyn Richardson, other women, Black and white, ascended the podiums of churches and meeting halls across the country to proclaim a 'social gospel of liberation and justice for all.' In the early 1860s Stewart moved to Washington, where she opened her own school. It attracted prominent members of the Black community who paid tuition; she also welcomed those who couldn't afford it free of charge. In her last job she worked as a matron at the Freedmen's Hospital (now Howard University Hospital), which provided aid to formerly enslaved people and their families. Toward the end of her life, Stewart learned that the government was offering pensions to veterans of the War of 1812, and applied as a veteran's widow. She used the income to underwrite a new, greatly expanded collection of her speeches and writings, 'Meditations From the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart,' which guaranteed that her voice and ideas would be preserved for future generations. She died at Freedmen's Hospital in December 1879. She was 76. Maria W. Stewart had a profound influence on later activists. Richardson, the historian, observed that her command of sophisticated oratory techniques such as call-and-response, anaphora, parataxis and the use of powerful and affecting rhythms proved she was 'a clear forerunner' to Sojourner Truth, Frances E.W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet and many others. And Waters, her biographer, credits Stewart with laying the groundwork for today's conversations around intersectionality with her pioneering writings on race, gender and class. In 2024, after the Boston State Senate announced that it would honor a woman with a bust in its chamber, the journalist Kimberly Atkins-Stohr published an opinion piece in The Boston Globe arguing that it should be of Stewart. In an interview, Stohr said she draws strength from Stewart's determination whenever she encounters vitriol in her inbox or on social media, following the example of America's first Black woman political writer: 'If Stewart had the ability to find it within herself to do that work, then I can, too.'
