Almost a month after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan, University of Minnesota students and alumni are now back on the hook for repaying their loan debts.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against the plan in late June, with conservative justices in the majority. Student loan payments, which the U.S. Department of Education placed on hold at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, will resume in October.

The University as an institution is not directly impacted by this decision, but many Minnesotans who graduated from the University with outstanding student loan debt will be. According to the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, 57% of students who graduated from the University in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree owed some form of student loan debt.

“Much of the impact of today’s ruling is specific to students no longer at the University, since it pertains to loans that are typically repaid after graduation and issued by third parties,” University public relations director Jake Ricker said in an email to the Minnesota Daily.

In a 2020 study conducted by The Institute for College Access and Success, Minnesota ranked 13th in the nation for average amount of debt and fifth for the percentage of graduated residents with student debt.

Shashank Murali, president of Undergraduate Student Government (USG), said the number of students with debt in Minnesota was one of the reasons USG has been pushing for the state legislature to help with the college affordability crisis.

“We are very disappointed with the fact that the Supreme Court reached that ruling. Now, as an organization — as we figure out what to do next — our next step is to support our students,” Murali said.

Murali explained one of the largest statewide initiatives USG lobbied for before this ruling was the North Star Promise Scholarship Program. Starting in fall 2024, Minnesota students with a family income of under $80,000 will be able to attend any Minnesota higher education institution without paying tuition.

USG Vice President Sara Davis said this program would help many incoming students once it is active. Davis also said the program would allow the University to provide more financial aid while cooperating with the state legislature.

“We know our experience and we were really intent on saying, ‘This is unsustainable.’ We want to make sure nobody who comes after us is in this boat,” Davis said.

University financial aid outlets, like financial aid counseling or the emergency grant program through One Stop Student Services, could help students who need financial aid, Davis said. However, none of them are long-term fixes for incoming students.

“To say that, ‘Oh, well, you can just prepare better or be more realistic about what college is going to cost,’ putting that onus only on students is not really a realistic solution,” Davis said.

The Board of Regents voted to raise tuition by 3.5% in late June, just a few days before the Supreme Court ruling was reached. Despite a second year in a row with a tuition increase, the University will still have the sixth-lowest out-of-state tuition of all Big Ten schools.

Nate Peterson, director at the Office of Student Finance, said his office and One Stop will be working with students who require financial aid to ensure they not only receive it but also take out only as much as they need in the midst of rising tuition.

“We encourage students to examine their financial aid offers closely, especially noting their borrowing history, to ensure they are accepting only the financial aid that they need for the academic year,” Peterson said.

Correction: The article previously included the incorrect title for Nate Peterson. He is the director at the Office of Student Finance.

The University of Minnesota Solar Vehicle Project (UMNSVP) unveiled its newest solar-powered car at a public event in front of the McNamara Alumni Center on Saturday.

The two-person vehicle, named Gaia, is the 15th solar-powered vehicle the team has created in 30 years. The first, Aurora I, was built in 1993, three years after the team was created in 1990.

The team builds all of the motors used in each model of their cars on-site. This is different from other solar vehicle teams across the country who order theirs externally, according to Amber Zierden, UMNSVP’s director of engineering.

This unique practice allows UMNSVP to customize their motor designs to make their car more efficient. Gaia employs this with its three-piece motor housing design, allowing for easier access and repairs while on and off the course.

“We have the front housing, the rear housing and the center housing, and what that does is it makes us more easily able to access the insides of the motor and make modifications and fixes if it shorts,” Zierden said.

Zierden, in a brief speech before the unveiling, said the team had gone through multiple design problems leading up to the reveal, including the motor controllers not allowing the team to drive the car or the sudden loss of access to the server containing all of the car’s structural and mechanical designs.

“Through all of this, I learned two things: the first is that the punches are always going to keep on coming, and the second is that our team is always going to learn how to roll with them,” Zierden said during her unveiling speech.

Gaia was the first car completed by the team in the post-COVID build cycle, according to Zane Johnson, director of operations with UMNSVP. Johnson said the 14th-generation car, Freyja, had an extended build cycle because of COVID.

“A lot of the team wasn’t around when Freyja was being designed, so we were just kinda throwing ideas at it and had a lot of driving force behind the creation. Because of that, I think we have the best-looking car that we’ve ever had,” Johnson said.

According to Johnson, the attendance at Gaia’s unveiling was around one-and-a-half times more than Freyja’s. Around 90 people attended Freyja’s reveal, and an estimated 150 to 170 came for Gaia’s.

Joel Roberts, the captain of Gaia’s race crew, emphasized how important it was for the car to function as efficiently as possible, which is what inspired many facets of Gaia’s design, including the three-piece motor housing design.

Roberts said the new regulations race officials implemented after the release of a documentary about the 2019 World Solar Challenge, where one of the vehicles had combusted, influenced part of Gaia’s design.

“The officials really tightened up on safety regs. Kind of to the point where you have to have everything triple-checked and every time you repair something on the car, it has to be re-approved by the officials before you can drive it,” Roberts said.

Gaia’s first race will be at the 2023 World Solar Challenge in October. It will also mark the team’s first international competition since the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Johnson, UMNSVP is one of only two North American teams competing in the week-long event.

UMNSVP is an open organization for students to join. Students can join the team by attending recruitment events during Fall 2023 or by visiting the team’s website.

An international survey effort headed by researchers from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences (E&ES) accurately determined the age and formation of the East Anatolian Fault for the first time.

Made up of researchers from the United States and Turkey, among other countries, Continental Dynamics-Central Anatolian Tectonics (CD-CAT) used seismic imaging to determine the five million-year-old fault had been formed by tectonic plates colliding with and burrowing underneath each other.

The original focus of the research, according to Donna Whitney, head of E&ES at the University and director of the study, was not to date the East Anatolian Fault. Instead, the researchers were asking where the boundary of Anatolia was and why it looked the way it did.

“Our question was, ‘Where’s the boundary between those [plates], and is this fault that we’re finding out some interesting things about — is that the boundary?’ And really, it seems it is,” Whitney said.

Whitney said the area of study was the “triple junction,” where Anatolia, the Arabian and Eurasian Plates have become sutured together under the surface due to the collision between the plates. This is the same area where earthquakes rocked Turkey and Syria in February 2023 originated. 

The researchers began by dating volcanic rocks that emerged from the fault. These rocks were dated at three million years old, which Whitney said was still younger than the fault itself. To accurately find the age of the fault, researchers had to take a deeper dive under the Earth’s crust.

Even after the collision sutured Arabia and Eurasia, as Whitney explained, the extremely hot mantle hundreds of kilometers below the Earth’s surface was still active. As the fault formed, even hotter liquid emerged from the mantle and left concentrated geological markings of surrounding rocks.

According to Whitney, the researchers were able to look at rocks within the fault that were reheated by the hot liquid that emerged from the mantle. Once the liquid reheated the rocks, geologically, they were essentially new rocks and could give an accurate picture of when the liquid first emerged — the same time the fault began to form.

“Our hypothesis was that rocks in the fault had been reheated — that resets these isotopic clocks that we were looking at,” Whitney said. “When you date the minerals, you’re getting the age of when the reheating reset the isotopes.”

Christian Teyssier, a professor with E&ES, explained the upper mantle under the Arabian Plate continues north past the fault until stopping abruptly close to the triple junction. The movements of this mantle under the surface that formed this fault could continue to influence the shaping of the Earth eons into the future.

“If Arabia continues to push toward the north, the deformation [in the Earth created by the fault] could jump towards the Central Anatolian Fault, for instance,” Teyssier said.

Nuretdin Kaymakci, a professor of geological engineering at Middle East Technological University in Turkey, confirmed the volatility of tectonics in this area. Since Anatolia is being dug into by Arabia and Eurasia colliding with each other even further, eventually, in millions of years, the collision between the two plates will push Anatolia out.

Kaymakci said the phenomenon is “like a lemon seed being squeezed between two fingers.”

In this instance, the Arabian Plate is the thumb and the Eurasian Plate is the pointer finger. When the lemon seed, or Anatolia, is squeezed between them for too long, it will eventually shoot out.

“The Arabian Plate is pushing Turkey towards Eurasia, and then, the material caught in between is just flung westward,” Kaymakci said.

CD-CAT was funded by the National Science Foundation grant in 2011, which was supposed to last until 2016 but received an extension until the project’s completion in 2019. Whitney said it was a massive group made up of both students and experts within the field.

Even after the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria in February 2023, Whitney and Teyssier met with colleagues on the project over Zoom to discuss the effects these devastating natural events had on the areas they had been working together to research for almost a decade.

Whitney and Teyssier said new research based on this project is already in the works. Jonathan Delph, a researcher at Purdue University who was involved with the CD-CAT project, will be back in Turkey leading a new project on the relation between the surface and the depths of the area.

“If we use the method that has not been used systematically, on the North Anatolian Fault, for instance, it can open some possibilities to revisit some of the faults that we think we know and maybe learn more from it,” Teyssier said.

A survey led by the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health revealed areas in which local health departments (LHDs) are experiencing staffing challenges since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The results of the survey were published in the July/August 2023 issue of the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice and received a response from 97% of LHDs in Minnesota.

The results of the study were split into multiple papers, the first led and written by School of Public Health researcher Harshada Karnik. Karnik’s paper focuses on the quantitative aspects of the mixed-method mode the researchers used to gather data.

“In this paper, we essentially looked at what the occupations are where local health departments need more staffing, how they are going to prioritize it and what some of the barriers are that are keeping them from filling these gaps in the workforce,” Karnik said.

According to Karnik, the study found certain occupations like public health nurses and community health workers have more gaps in their staffing that need to be filled than others within the industry.

Karnik explained a lot of LHDs statewide are understaffed and the workers they do have are often underpaid. She also said LHDs struggle to create new positions which then also need to be filled by employees.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Karnik, health departments did not have the authorization to create new positions. With the continued lack of new hires and the slow burnout of existing employees, the gaps in the system became more apparent.

“If you look at the occupations where health departments need to create additional positions versus where they need to fill existing, vacant positions, I think that’s where we sort of see the difference in what the pandemic has rendered important,” Karnik said.

A unique factor this study took into consideration was the presence of external factors like children or the commute to work which, according to Karnik, had not been considered in similar surveys.

Karnik’s paper focused on the quantitative results of the study while Chelsey Kirkland, another School of Public Health researcher on the study, wrote a second paper honing in on the reasoning behind those numbers. 

Kirkland said the researchers worked with the State Associations of County and City Health Officials (SACCHO) to organize these focus groups to further explain the gaps in the workforce.

Kirkland’s paper detailed retention strategies as a result of employee burnout. Her findings suggested workers experiencing fatigue could benefit from having some of their duties transferred to someone else in a different, better-suited position or even by the employee themself changing to an alternate role.

The biggest concept Kirkland emphasized was continued employer flexibility. She said allowing public health workers to manage their personal and work lives better would be a good way to reduce burnout.

“One of the other things that we heard several times over was that when supervisors worked alongside their employees, the employees really felt like they were in it together — and they are all working towards this one goal,” Kirkland said.

Another set of external factors to consider is the divide between governmental health departments and the private sector, according to School of Public Health researcher Jason Orr. 

Orr said within the governmental public health field, different positions are not as competitive as they are within the private sector. According to Orr, nurses’ pay within the private sector is about 14% higher than in governmental public health.

“That’s one of the key barriers to hiring individuals, is that local governments in particular really cannot offer as competitive of wages, typically, and there are less resources available to hire staff,” Orr said.

Orr added that, over the past few years, there has been more infusion of money into support for local health agencies. State and federal grants like the CDC Federal Infrastructure Grant that funded this research are helping fill newer positions that were harder to fill before due to financial constraints.

“We’re seeing some movement across the nation and Minnesota to reduce the barriers to hiring and improve the working conditions for governmental public health,” Orr said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled race could no longer be used as a factor in college admissions processes on June 29, leaving higher education institutions nationwide to find new ways to diversify incoming classes.

The decision overturned two rulings for cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina in lower courts and went against 45 years of precedent in favor of affirmative action. However, faculty members from the University of Minnesota said this decision did not come as a shock. 

Vice Provost and Dean Robert McMaster said the Office of Admissions and Office of General Counsel had been co-leading a University effort on preparation in case this ruling was reached. McMaster said they took into account other states that had been blocking affirmative action on a state level for potential changes that would need to be made to the University’s own admissions policies.

“There have been other states — California, Michigan, Nebraska, Washington — others that already have this kind of legislation in place, and the initial impact was negative on racial and ethnic diversity,” McMaster said.

The University considers diversity broadly in its current admissions process, according to McMaster. The application, until June 29, included two types of factors: quantitative primary factors like GPA and class rank, and more broad context factors like volunteering and leadership, which is where students could mention their own experiences with race, gender, sexuality and other defining traits.

McMaster said due to the lengthy 40-page nature of the ruling, it would take the University time to consider what changes to make to their admissions processes to still allow for a diverse student body while adhering to the rules the Supreme Court set.

“Despite this ruling, the University of Minnesota maintains steadfastly committed to enrolling a diverse class,” McMaster said. “We highly value the diversity of our undergraduate student body; we’re going to continue to maintain that.”

The University’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) president Shashank Murali said even though faculty had been preparing for the decision, the student government and student body were caught by surprise. Murali said he and his peers were disappointed by the decision.

“It’s important to understand the countless opportunities that affirmative action has given to those who have been underrepresented across our country, and this ruling definitely sets us back,” Murali said.

Murali said USG plans on working with the University administration to ensure student voices are heard and considered when making decisions on the changes to the admissions process.

“We will continue to push the University to take proactive steps to fill in the gaps that are left by the affirmative action ruling,” Murali said.

Even though there are almost five decades of precedent in favor of affirmative action, the decision was reached because the Supreme Court “decided that precedent is not something that they will necessarily respect unless it points in the direction of the policy preferences that they agree with,” said Tim Johnson, professor of political science and law at the University. 

“Given what the court has done with precedent in the areas of abortion and religious freedom law in the past two terms, it was pretty clear that the six-person conservative majority was going to overturn the existing precedent dealing with affirmative action in college admissions,” Johnson said.

The precedent for this case was set by the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case of 1978, in which the ruling justices found accepting applicants based solely on race was unconstitutional. However, the same case also found the use of affirmative action to build a more diverse class under certain circumstances was protected by the Constitution.

Johnson, who specializes in areas of study surrounding the Supreme Court, added that even though the precedent set by the 1978 case was ignored for the 2023 ruling, it was not fully overturned and can still be upheld for similar cases in the future.

“Even if those cases were overturned, the court could jump back to them. And if you have the votes on the court, which is the majority — just five over four — you can set the law the way that you would like the law to be set,” Johnson said.

The University said in a message from the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost Rachel Croson they will continue to practice recruiting efforts that yield increased diversity on campus, which McMaster and Murali confirmed.

Research by the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and other bee experts released on June 16 confirmed a total number of bee species in the state is 508.

According to researchers involved with the project, the survey is a first of its kind. It was conducted with the intent of compiling all bee research statewide in order to create a “checklist” that would be easier to reference for future research and conservation efforts.

The first-ever documentation of bee species in Minnesota was published in 1919 by Frederic Washburn. However, entomology researcher and first author of the checklist, Zachary Portman, said this survey only recognized around 60 bee species and did not even cover the full range of Minnesota counties.

Portman added bee survey efforts are currently conducted individually by research institutes, like the DNR and the University’s Cariveau Native Bee Lab. These efforts were helpful, but there was no single statewide database for these researchers to reference.

“This was essentially a way to go through everything, compile it, make sure everything’s on the same page and come up with kinda the ‘definitive list’ of what bees we have here,” Portman said.

The identification effort began by compiling all of the data from places like the DNR and the Cariveau Lab that had been conducting research before. DNR zoologist Nicole Gerjets also said researchers went through museums to gather historical records of all bees that had been chronicled in the past.

With past and present records in-hand, the researchers re-visited each of the four ecological provinces within Minnesota to see if any bees had been missed or could fall under a new classification.

“Oftentimes, you’re looking and comparing very minute differences between individuals,” Gerjets said. “So that’s why it’s very crucial to have a taxonomist like Zach be able to work with these specimens and really take that time to study these specimens.”

The researchers also wanted to see what bees were missing from the checklist. Gerjets explained that in their research, the teams found that a lot of these missing bees were not actually missing. These bees were actually just oligolectic, or “specialist” bees.

According to Gerjets, about 30 percent of the bees in Minnesota are specialists, which is a kind of bee that only collects pollen from one species of plant. This one-plant focus made them harder to track and identify, explaining their “missing” status.

“Those [specialist] bees have an extraordinarily tight relationship with certain plant species that we think are most vulnerable to different threats or stressors in our environment,” said DNR ecologist Jessica Petersen. “If those plants disappear, then the bees will also disappear.”

Petersen also said there are currently no bee species on the Minnesota endangered species list, which will be recounted in the wake of this research. Petersen hopes in the wake of this survey effort, the DNR’s next big step will be to dial in on specialist bee conservation efforts in conjunction with the Cariveau Lab.

The DNR received a grant from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund in 2014. Research began a year later in 2015, according to Gerjets and Petersen. The Cariveau Lab joined soon after with a grant from the same fund in 2016.

“The funding is important to us,” Petersen said. “This couldn’t have been done without the partnership between the University and us at the DNR.”

The final field season was 2022, according to Gerjets. Petersen added that the DNR received another grant from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund that went into effect July 1.

The full checklist is published in Zootaxa, a peer-reviewed international journal that publishes papers on taxonomy and systematic zoology.

A College of Science and Engineering professor and graduate students developed a new variant of a superconducting diode, a key component in most computers, according to a University of Minnesota press release.

Compared to older superconducting diodes, this component uses less energy, has a faster computing speed and can process multiple signal inputs at the same time.

Diodes are key components in computers and other common electronic devices. Traditionally, they can only conduct an electrical current in one direction.

“They’re used a lot in regular electronics — kind of like a one-way valve,” said Vlad Pribiag, an associate professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy and senior author of the paper. “So you can flow a current in one way, but you might not flow it the other way.”

A superconducting diode is more powerful than an ordinary one because of its properties, which allow it to conduct more electricity with less resistance and in multiple directions as opposed to the one-way valve used in traditional diodes. Pribiag said any ordinary superconducting diode would cause the flow of energy to dissipate if its direction was changed. 

This problem with older superconducting diodes is one of the reasons the new one was developed. The device utilizes Josephson junctions, which are made when a non-superconducting material, such as nickel, is placed between two superconducting materials, like aluminum.

Gino Graziano, a graduate student on the development team, said unlike a regular superconductor, which only houses two of these Josephson terminals for controlling electrical currents, this device features three, allowing for more control over the flow and speed of energy.

The materials and techniques used to manufacture this kind of diode are industry-friendly, which means the community could see this kind of component appearing in high-powered computers used by large institutions. 

“When you fabricate these devices, they turn out more-or-less the same,” said Mohit Gupta, another graduate student on the team. “When you’re talking large-scale, everything has to be replicated exactly.”

While it is unlikely this type of component could be found in a household computer or personal laptop, due to the growing interest in superconducting technology and quantum computing, Pribiag said this device could stay relevant for use in more powerful machines for at least the next decade.

One of these uses Pribiag expanded upon was using this device to delve deeper into neuromorphic computing — a way of developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology using hardware instead of software. Neuromorphic computing is a practice in which the components of a computer connect and send signals in a similar way to human neurons.

Pribiag said the multiple terminals of this superconducting diode could bring in multiple signals at once, which the practice requires.

“It will take, certainly, additional research to really see how this could play out, but we have a basic promising functionality here that we think could lead to neuromorphic and thus AI computing,” Pribiag said.

The full research paper is published in Nature Communications, an open-access journal intended to represent significant scientific advances to researchers across a variety of scientific fields.