A Blog on McConnell Center Life

By Greta Noble        25,000 blue whales swim throughout the oceans every day. 300 million humans walk through the streets of the United States every day. 1.8 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer this year.  None of the blue whales swimming through the oceans have this chronic illness.        While it would seem that the increase in cell count of large animals would correlate to an increase in the quantity of cancer cells, it turns out that blue whales do not get cancer. This puzzle is known as Peto’s Paradox. As scientists conduct more research, they believe that large, long-lived animals seem to have evolved mechanisms that are 1000 times more capable of suppressing cancer than humans. Through genomics and comparative methods, scientists are working to understand and utilize these suppressors for treatment in human cancer therapy. For example, genomic analyses revealed that the African elephant genome contains 20 copies of t...

By Camryn McPherson The United States Air Force Academy Assembly was an amazing experience I owe to the McConnell Center’s two Army War College Fellows, Col. Karen Rutka and LTC Kimberly Pringle, and the rest of our wonderful staff. Dyllan Tipton, McConnell Scholar Class of 2026, and I flew out to Colorado Springs nervous and uncertain of what to expect of the next week.  This year’s USAFA Assembly was titled “Waging Peace on the Final Frontier: Shaping the Future of Space Policy and Defense.” Let me be honest, before I was accepted to this conference, I knew basically nothing about space. My knowledge was limited to the big dipper and a little bit about Elon Musk’s Space X endeavors. Being a political science and psychology scholar, space was far outside my comfort zone. This is why I applied: to expand my horizons, and to be pushed past my limits. For me, college has been a place to invest more in my passions, deepening my knowledge about what I already loved. I learned more abou...

By Shelby Disney         On Thursday October 13, 2022, in a court room filled with mourning relatives of the 17 victims of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, a Florida jury decided to spare the life of the convicted assailant, Nikolas Cruz. Cruz was found guilty of 17 counts of 1 st degree murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. The massacre was a brutal event beginning with Cruz taking an Uber to the school on Valentine’s Day in 2018, bringing an illegally obtained AR-15 into the building disguised in a bag, and unleashing countless rounds of ammunition onto the occupants of the school. The sentence came over four years after the attack and sent shockwaves to the families of the horrifying attack.      This situation raises the question: Is the death penalty dead? The jury’s decision not to impose the most severe punishment possible for one of the most extreme crimes committable, quite possibly introduced a new era in punishme...

By Logan Bibby      Even though I still feel like I’m 15, it’s not 2017 anymore. “Despacito” isn’t torturing everyone through the radio, Tom Brady isn’t winning Super Bowls with the Patriots anymore, Donald Trump isn’t the President of the United States, and Spam Instagram isn’t at its peak. Spam Instagram, more popularly known as Spam IG, is a community of more casual Instagram accounts, often making comedic or personal posts behind a screen name. Spams or “Finstas”—standing for fake Instagrams, separate from the “Main Instagram”—are those casual, private, and usually, secondary Instagram accounts that people have to make these types of posts that either target an audience of close friends or people that don’t know them in real life.      In 2017, Instagram saw a surge in these kinds of accounts. Every middle and high schooler caught onto the craze, creating new personas behind funny usernames and sharing them with their friends, or even strangers. Now I w...

By  Megan Crowley Early on in September, my roommate stumbled upon an advertisement for the Paristown Flea Market, which would be taking place the next day. According to the ad, the event would feature dozens of booths from local small businesses, with products ranging from clothing to antiques to furniture to vegetables. My roommates and I being generally fond of these things, it didn’t take long before we were resolving to wake up early the next morning so that we would have a chance to shop around the market before it got too crowded. We stuck to that plan, and though I didn’t end up buying much, I did walk out with a few old LIFE magazines. They only cost $1, and since both cover stories related in some way to events that I was talking about in my classes at the time, I had decided to purchase them on something of a whim. While looking through them later, entertaining some vague notion about maybe cutting out some of the pictures to decorate my then-barren walls, I ran across t...

By  Mallory Slucher Picture this: it's early July and you're in an old record store basement trying to escape the summer heat. While perusing the aisles you happen upon a vintage Dolly Parton album. You gasp, grab the record, and without thinking, you go up to the register and buy it. Then… you realize you don’t even have a record player. Well, this happy accident was enough to lead to one of my new favorite collections, my vinyl collection, when I had this exact event occur this summer. I think it is evidence enough to argue that all roads lead to Dolly. Listening to music has never been a hobby of mine. Sure, I’ve followed a couple of artists over the years, and no one can deny that I can boogie down to some 70’s music like there's no tomorrow - but music has never been a big part of my life. I’m the girl that makes my friends sit through Spotify ads in my car because I don’t listen to music enough for Spotify Premium to be justifiable. Collecting vinyl seemed silly. I al...

By  Anna Williams 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Quite a frightening sentence, I know. At that time, I had been rising every Saturday to travel from my on-campus apartment to go volunteer at a dog shelter that I had chosen as my routine service site. After I walked the dogs, I would pick up my groceries for the week. Chicken, rice, and broccoli in bulk to “meal-prep” for dinner for the week. Chocolate rice cakes and almond butter for breakfast after my 7:00 a.m. workout classes at the Student Recreation Center. And of course, espresso grounds and oat milk for my daily lattes to get me through my science classes. I would travel home and listen to On Purpose , a podcast by life coach Jay Shetty, in hopes that I would get inspired to do 8 hours' worth of studying on my “rest” day. This routine, although seemingly productive, had been the detriment of my ability to enjoy what life is truly about, being one with the world around me. One Saturday, as I was driving to the first location...