Thursday, December 10, 2009
Acidic drainage from abandoned mines contaminates tens of thousands of miles of streams in the United States, including more than 5,000 miles in Pennsylvania. With funding from an NSF Faculty Early Career Development award, Rachel Brennan is experimenting with the use of crab shell chitin to clean up particularly difficult sites. Preliminary results from her experiments in Cambria County show definite promise -- increased pH levels and re-capture of toxic metals at less cost than that of other reclamation methods. (more)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Lewisburg beekeeper Dave Hackenberg and others in the trenches have their own opinions about what is going on with regard to colony collapse disorder (CCD) and recent, dramatic losses of honeybees. Hackenberg doesn't mince words. "Our scientists are working their heads off on a little bit of nothing. All we're doing here is slowly reinventing the wheel of what Europe has already figured out." Find out what France and Germany have done to combat CCD in this final segment of Research Penn State's three-part, in-depth look at Penn State's efforts toward understanding the complex and alarming loss of honeybees. (more)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
To solve a murder mystery with millions of victims and no smoking gun requires CSI-style teamwork, or as Dennis vanEngelsdorp likes to say "a coordinated effort that takes a page from the beehive, where all the individuals play a role to make the hive successful." Penn State's entomology department, long recognized for its strengths in disease research and chemical analysis, has emerged as a leader in honeybee and colony collapse disorder research nationwide. Research Penn State takes an in-depth look into the department's efforts toward understanding the complex and alarming loss of honeybees. This is part two of a three-part series. (more)
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
While the words "endangered species" typically call to mind photogenic tigers, pandas or whales, an estimated 80 percent of all known animal species on Earth are insects, and their extinction often goes unremarked. A recent study notes that hundreds of thousands of insects could be lost in the next 50 years and that the loss of "keystone" insect species -- those on which many other species depend -- could be particularly detrimental for ecosystems and people. Apis mellifera, the western honeybee, is the very essence of a keystone insect. Research Penn State takes an in-depth look at Penn State's efforts toward understanding the complex and alarming loss of honeybees. This is part one of a three-part series. (more)
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Depending on which study you read, the relapse rate for drug and alcohol addiction ranges from 50 to 90 percent. These numbers do not surprise Kyung-An Han, associate professor of biology, whose primary work seeks to understand how molecules in the brain mediate behavior. Han argues that addiction has nothing to do with willpower. She says, "Addiction is a problem of the brain that can be chronic and progressive. It is not a moral issue. Our behavior is largely controlled by brain function." (more)
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Penn State's expanded initiative in energy sciences and engineering is launching a major research alliance with one of the world's leading integrated energy companies, Chevron Energy Technology Company, to research coal conversion technologies. The joint research initiative with Chevron will focus on coal chemistry and conversion technology, advanced fuels, combustion, analysis methods, reactor science, separations, process technology, and CO2/greenhouse gas management and conversion. This alliance will also integrate research with educational and career opportunities for students and graduates specializing in coal conversion and energy technologies. Under the alliance, Chevron will provide up to $17.5 million over the next five years to the University. (more)
Monday, April 02, 2007
Coming to the United States after 9/11, Jonathan Marks taught international law and the law and ethics of counterterrorism at Princeton and UNC-Chapel Hill before his appointment as a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins in 2004. In the fall of 2006, seeking to combine his various interests, he joined the Penn State faculty as an associate professor of bioethics, humanities and law. "The public face of bioethics," Marks notes, "concerns itself with hot-button issues, frequently at the level of patient care -- cloning, stem cells, physician-assisted suicide and a dozen others." But underlying those issues, Marks argues, are larger, policy-level questions that are too often neglected. (more)
