Subra Suresh, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), will speak on Thursday, April 5, in Heritage Hall at the HUB-Robeson Center on Penn State's University Park campus. Part of this year's Nelson W. Taylor Lecture in Materials, Suresh's presentation, titled "Biomechanics and Human Diseases," will begin at 11 a.m. The event will begin at 9:45 a.m. with talks by three Penn State faculty members. (more)
For the first time, a group of chemists, physicists and engineers has developed crystalline materials that allow an optical fiber to have integrated, high-speed electronic functions. The potential applications of such optical fibers include improved telecommunications and other hybrid optical and electronic technologies, improved laser technology, and more-accurate remote-sensing devices. The research was initiated by Rongrui He, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry at Penn State. The international team, led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State, will publish its findings in the journal Nature Photonics. (more)
A new chemical technique for depositing a noncrystalline form of silicon into the long, ultra-thin pores of optical fibers has been developed by an international team of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. The technique, which is the first of its kind to use high-pressure chemistry for making well-developed films and wires of this particular kind of silicon semiconductor, will help scientists to make more-efficient and more-flexible optical fibers. The findings, by an international team led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State, will be published in a future print edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. (more)
The "Science Beat" audio podcasts about research in Penn State's Eberly College of Science have been selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its streaming Internet radio show, "Science360 Radio." The Science Beat podcasts join NSF's collection of radio programs, which stream live worldwide, 24/7 and also are available on the Web and via iPhone, iPad and Android devices. On Tuesday, Nov. 29, the Science Beat audio podcasts will be showcased as the featured show on the welcome page of NSF's "Science360 Radio," at http://science360.gov/radio. (more)
Students in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology who are interested in protecting data from hackers and saboteurs will soon be able to apply for a program in which they will receive scholarship money and expert training for their chosen field. (more)
Galaxy -- an open-source, Web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical and genetic research -- is now available as a cloud computing resource. A team of researchers has developed the new technology, which will help scientists and biomedical researchers to harness such tools as DNA-sequencing and analysis software, as well as storage capacity for large quantities of scientific data. (more)
Both climate change and humans were responsible for the extinction of some large, cold-adapted, plant-eating mammals, according to research that is the first of its kind to use genetic, archeological, and climatic data together to infer the population history of large-bodied Ice-Age mammals. The research will be published in the journal Nature.
The study's findings are expected to shed light on the possible fates of living species of mammals as our planet continues its current warming cycle. Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University, is a member of the research team. High-resolution images are online at
http://www.science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2011-news/Shapiro10-2011 (more)
Penn State is host to 21 new National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recipients in 2011-12. These students join 28 prior recipients continuing in the University's graduate degree programs in the Eberly College of Science and the Colleges of Agricultural Sciences, Earth and Mineral Sciences, Engineering, Health and Human Development, Information Sciences and Technology, and the Liberal Arts, as well as the Intercollege Graduate Degree Programs. The NSF program supports outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering, STEM education and learning research, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees. (more)
A team of scientists led by a Penn State University chemist has demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of a method of molecular depth profiling -- a technique used to analyze the surface of ultra-thin materials such as human tissue, nanoparticles, and other substances. In the new study, the researchers used computer simulations and modeling to show the effectiveness and limitations of the alternative method, which is being used by a research group in Taiwan. The new computer-simulation findings may help future researchers to choose when to use the new method of analyzing how and where particular molecules are distributed throughout the surface layers of ultra-thin materials. The research will be published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. (more)
A new state-of-the-art instrument -- a precision spectrograph for finding planets in habitable zones around cool, nearby stars -- is being developed at Penn State with support from a new $3.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation. "This new Habitable Zone Planet Finder instrument will allow us to detect the existence of planets that are similar in mass to Earth and also are in orbits that allow liquid water to exist on their surfaces," said Suvrath Mahadevan, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a co-principal investigator of the project. (more)
