News

Embryology

Embryology
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Carnegie’s BioEYES Honored Twofold

Baltimore, MD—Carnegie’s educational outreach program, BioEYES, will be the recipient of the 2012 Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Prize from the Society for Developmental Biology. BioEYES founders Steve Farber and Jamie Shuda (University of Pennsylvania), will accept the award at the upcoming annual meeting of the society in Montreal in July. BioEYES, with program manager Valerie Butler, is also currently featured in a video on the front page of the Baltimore City Schools' website.

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Geophysical Laboratory

Geophysical Laboratory
Monday, December 19, 2011
A New Kind of Metal in the Deep Earth

The crushing pressures and intense temperatures in Earth’s deep interior squeeze atoms and electrons so closely together that they interact very differently. With depth materials change. New experiments and supercomputer computations discovered that iron oxide undergoes a new kind of transition under deep Earth conditions. Iron oxide, FeO, is a component of the second most abundant mineral at Earth’s lower mantle, ferropericlase. The finding could alter our understanding of deep Earth dynamics and the behavior of the protective magnetic field, which shields our planet from harmful cosmic rays.

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Global Ecology

Global Ecology
Monday, January 23, 2012
Geoengineering and global food supply

Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of coal, oil, and gas have been increasing over the past decades, causing the Earth to get hotter and hotter. There are concerns that a continuation of these trends could have catastrophic effects, including crop failures in the heat-stressed tropics. This has led some to explore drastic ideas for combating global warming, including the idea of trying to counteract it by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth. However, it has been suggested that reflecting sunlight away from the Earth might itself threaten the food supply of billions of people. New research led by Carnegie’s Julia Pongratz examines the potential effects that geoengineering the climate could have on global food production and concludes that sunshade geoengineering would be more likely to improve rather than threaten food security.

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Observatories

Observatories
Monday, January 9, 2012
Mirror Casting Event for the Giant Magellan Telescope

On January 14, 2012, the second 8.4-meter (27.6 ft) diameter mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be cast inside a rotating furnace at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory Mirror Lab (SOML) underneath the campus football stadium. The Mirror Lab will host a special event to highlight the milestone. Members of the media are invited to visit the Mirror Lab on Saturday morning, January 14, 2012, between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. MST.

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Plant Biology

Plant Biology
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
New tool offers unprecedented access for root studies

Plant roots are fascinating plant organs – they not only anchor the plant, but are also the world’s most efficient mining companies. Roots live in darkness and direct the activities of the other organs, as well as interact with the surrounding environment. Charles Darwin posited in The Power of Movement of Plants that the root system acts as a plant’s brain. Due to the difficulty of accessing root tissue in intact live plants, research of these hidden parts has always lagged behind research on the more visible parts of plants. But now: a new technology--developed jointly by Carnegie and Stanford University--could revolutionize root research.

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Terrestrial Magnetism

Department of Terrestrial Magnetism
Thursday, February 2, 2012
New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby cool star

An international team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

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