David Reynolds, director of South Dakota State University's School of Performing Arts and a scholar of music history, spent the better part of the last year studying the work of Johann Nepomuk Hummel, one of history's greatest classical composers, and arguably his most famous piece of music, the Concerto a Trumpet principale in E major. 

In the late 1990s, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe reintroduced approximately 35 river otters into the Big Sioux River. Otters, which at one time could be found throughout the Upper Midwest, had become nearly extinct in South Dakota due to habitat loss, pollution and unregulated harvest. Following a successful reintroduction, the otters began to repopulate the rivers of eastern South Dakota. Now, two South Dakota State University researchers have an ongoing project to learn more about the river otter population. 

The Basu Lab, housed in South Dakota State University's Department of Mechanical Engineering and headed by assistant professor Saikat Basu, has been named the recipient of a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to study the fluid mechanics of transport in dense cancerous tumors. 

Mass spectrometers are used by researchers to measure the mass of a compound. This tool, found in all top research laboratories around the country and housed in SDSU's Core Campus Mass Spectrometry Facility, has a wide variety of research applications, from cyanide analysis to determining past climate conditions.