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.

more »

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.

more »

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.

more »

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.

more »

Plant Biology

Plant Biology
Monday, February 6, 2012
Steroids control gas exchange in plants

Plants leaves are sealed with a gas-tight wax layer to prevent water loss. Plants breathe through microscopic pores called stomata (Greek for mouths) on the surfaces of leaves. Over 40% of the carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere passes through stomata each year, as well a water volume twice that of the whole atmosphere. As the key conduits for CO2 uptake and water evaporation, stomata are critical for both our climate and plant productivity. Thus, not surprisingly, the total number and distribution of stomata are strictly regulated by plants to optimize photosynthesis while minimizing water loss. The mechanisms for such regulation have remained elusive.

more »

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.

more »
more