Contact Zhi-Yong Wang at Carnegie's Department of Plant Biology, 650-325-1521 ext. 205, or via e-mail at zywang24@stanford.edu
...First gamma-ray bursts detected by new NASA satellite pinpointed by Carnegie and Caltech astronomers
Contact Carnegie Observatories’ Edo Berger at 626-304-0251, or eberger@ociw.edu
Contact Carnegie’s Dr. Gregory Asner, at 650-380-2828, gpa@stanford.edu,
or Stanford’s Peter Vitousek, at vitousek@stanford.edu
...Contact: Ivo Labbé at the Carnegie Observatories, ivo@ociw.edu, or 626-304-0265;
Jiasheng Huang at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for...
Contact Sara Seager at 202-478- 8868, or seager@dtm.ciw.edu;
Tina McDowell in the Carnegie Publications office at 202-939-1120, or...
Contact Tina McDowell@ 202-939-1120, or tmcdowell@ciw.edu
Carnegie molecular biologist Joseph Gall discusses the work of groundbreaking microscopists, biologists, zoologists, and geneticists with Bill Nye, "The Science...
Contact Eugene Gregoryanz at 202-478-8953, e.gregoryanz@gl.ciw.edu
Or Olga Degtyareva, 202-478-8948,...
Contact Douglas Rumble, III, Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory, 202 478- 8990, rumble@gl.ciw.edu
The paper may be viewed at this link...
The President and Trustees of the Carnegie Institution
cordially invite you to view the
CARNEGIE EVENING LECTURE...
Contact Dr. Russell Hemley at 202- 478-8951, r.hemley@gl.ciw.edu;
or Chih-Shiue Yan at 202-478-8959, c.yan@gl.ciw.edu
Contact Sakiko Okumoto at 650-325-1521 x 636, sokumoto@stanford.edu;
Wolf Frommer at 650-325-1521 x 208,...
Contacts: Robert Sanders, University of California, Berkeley: (510) 643-6998, rsanders@berkeley.edu
M. Mitchell Waldrop, NSF: (703) 292-7752,...
Contact Maud Boyet at 202-478-8482 / boyet@dtm.ciw.edu
or Rick Carlson at 202-478-8474 / carlson@dtm.ciw.edu
...Contact Jung-Fu Lin at 202-478-8911, j.lin@gl.ciw.edu; Ho-kwang Mao,h.mao@gl.ciw.edu 202-321-8899;
or Wolfgang...
Contact Dr. Ken Caldeira at kcaldeira@gmail.com, or kcaldeira@globalecology.stanford.edu, 650-462-1047 x204;
...Contact Marilyn Fogel 202-478-8981, m.fogel@gl.ciw.edu
Contact Jung-Fu Lin at 925-424-4157, j.lin@gl.ciw.edu; Viktor Struzhkin at 202-478-8952, v.struzhkin@gl.ciw.edu; or
Steve Jacobsen, 202-478-7975,...
Contact Armando Gil de Paz at 626-304-0273, agpaz@ociw.edu; or
Barry Madore at 626-304-0247, bmadore@ociw.edu, orbarry@ipac.caltech.edu
Contact Frances Donald 44 0 1592 643 200, fdonald@catchline.co.uk
Or Alex Barr 44 0 141 333 9585
Images available from Frances Donald
...Contact Russell Hemley at Hemley@gl.ciw.edu, 202-478-8951; or Dave Mao at Mao@gl.ciw.edu
For images, contact Tina McDowell,...
First Minister Jack McConnell is to present entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Tom Farmer with the philanthropic equivalent of a Nobel Prize, the Carnegie UK Trusts announced today.
Mr McConnell is one of six presenters who will attend this year’...
Contact Leonard Garcia, NASA Goddard, 301-286-9486, garcia@mail630.gsfc.nasa.gov;
or Michelle Brooks, Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at 202-478-8830;...
Contact Dr. Ken Caldeira at kcaldeira@globalecology.stanford.edu, or by cell at 650-704-7212
Contact at Carnegie, Marilyn Fogel at 202-478-8981, email...
Contact Carnegie’s Dr. Gregory Asner, office 650-462-1047 x202; cell 650-380-2828; e-mail gasner@globalecology.stanford.edu
...Carnegie Contact: Dr. Shauna Somerville; ssomerville@stanford.edu or (650) 325-1521 ext. 257
Or...
Baltimore, MD – Carnegie Institution trustees will dedicate a new, $31.2-million research laboratory on the Johns Hopkins University campus on Thursday, December 1, 2005, at 6:30 PM. The building will be...
Carnegie Contact: Dr. Ken Caldeira; kcaldeira@globalecology.stanford.edu or (650) 704-7212
...
Contact : Dr. Benjamin Ohlstein, 410-246-3003, or 3403, email, ohlstein@ciwemb.edu;
or Dr. Allan...
Contact Tina McDowell at 202-939-1120, or tmcdowell@ciw.edu
Carnegie Institution trustee emeritus John Diebold died at the age of 79. Mr. Diebold actively served on the Carnegie board of trustees from 1975 through 2002....
Washington, D.C.--New theoretical work shows that gas-giant planet formation can occur around binary stars in much the same way that it occurs around single stars like the Sun. The work is presented today by Dr. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial...
Washington, D.C. -- On January 20, 2006, Moody’s Investors Service assigned a Aaa/VMIG1 rating to the Carnegie Institution’s Series 2006 bonds issued though the California Educational Facilities Authority. It is the highest rating that the service assigns—only 10 other not-for-...
Stanford, CA – Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Plant Biology have found that photosynthetic bacteria living in scalding Yellowstone hot springs have two radically different metabolic identities. As the sun goes down, these cells quit their day job of...
Carnegie scientists breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday, January 15 when NASA’s Stardust mission landed safely with the first solid comet samples ever brought back to Earth. As members of the mission’s Preliminary Examination Team, Larry Nittler and Conel Alexander (both Department...
Stanford, CA -- Increased carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly making the world’s oceans more acidic and, if unabated, could cause a mass extinction of marine life similar to one that occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie...
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee:
I am grateful for the opportunity to testify before you today. I have appeared before this Committee many times in my former job as the NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science, and few times since. I now appear...
Washington, DC – Like modern day alchemists, materials scientists often turn unassuming substances into desirable ones. But instead of working metal into gold, they create strange new compounds that could make the electronic components of the future smaller, faster, and more durable...
Washington, D.C. Today’s climate change pales in comparison with what happened as Earth gave birth to its oxygen-containing atmosphere billions of years ago. By analyzing clues contained in rocks, scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory have found that the...
Washington, D.C. Rocky planets such as Earth and Mars are born when small particles smash together to form larger, planet-sized clusters in a planet-forming disk, but researchers are less sure about how gas-giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn form. Is core accretion—the process...
Washington, D.C. Evidence never dies in the popular TV show Cold Case. Nor do some traces of life disappear on Earth, Mars, or elsewhere. An international team of scientists,* including researchers from the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, has developed techniques to...
Washington, D.C. On Sunday, January 15, NASA’s Stardust mission landed safely with the first solid comet fragments ever brought back to Earth. Members of the mission’s Preliminary Examination Team, including several from the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory and...
Baltimore, MD – We are all familiar with the dangers of too much fat in our diet—increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are just a few of the most severe consequences. But some rare metabolic diseases, such as hypolipidemia and Tangier disease, seem to work in...
Washington, D.C.—Christine D. Smith, formerly associate vice president for Main Campus development and senior director of development for the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, has been appointed the first chief advancement officer of the Carnegie Institution of...
Pasadena, CA. The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the first extremely large new-generation telescope to begin production, has gained a new partner—the Australian National University (ANU) http://www.anu.edu.au/. The announcement made today comes...
Stanford, CA – Cellulose—a fibrous molecule found in all plants—is the most abundant biological material on Earth. It is also a favored target of renewable, plant-based biofuels research. Despite overwhelming interest, scientists know relatively little about how plant cells...
Washington, DC. To truly understand some of the movement we see at the Earth’s surface, scientists have to probe deep into the interior. A region near the planet’s core, about 1,800 miles down called the core-mantle boundary, is particularly intriguing.
Washington, DC – Like an interplanetary spaceship carrying passengers, meteorites have long been suspected of ferrying relatively young ingredients of life to our planet. Using new techniques, scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism have...
Washington, DC – Nobel laureate and Carnegie trustee emeritus Charles H. Townes has received the 2006 Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Board, the oversight body of the National Science Foundation. At the age of 90, Townes is an active researcher at the University of...
Washington, DC – Minerals crunched by intense pressure near the Earth’s core lose much of their ability to conduct infrared light, according to a new study from the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory. Since infrared light contributes to the flow of heat, the result...
Washington, D.C. Astronomers detected unusually high quantities of carbon, the basis of all terrestrial life, in an infant solar system around nearby star Beta Pictoris, 63 light-years away. “For years we’ve looked to this early forming solar system as one that might be going...
Washington, DC. A new explanation for forming “super-Earths” suggests that they are more likely to be found orbiting red dwarf stars—the most abundant type of star—than gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn. The theory, by Dr. Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution’s Department...
Washington, DC – Three new objects locked into roughly the same orbit as Neptune—called “Trojan” asteroids—have been found by researchers from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) and the Gemini Observatory. The discovery offers evidence that Neptune...
Washington, DC – The Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced today that opposition in Australia to the grant of the institutions’ patent application related to the discovery of RNAi has been withdrawn. The opposition was...
Carnegie Institution planetary-formation theorist and 1997 National Medal of Science recipient George Wetherill died from heart failure on July 19, 2006, at his Washington, D.C. home. Wetherill revolutionized our understanding of how our planets and solar system formed through his...
Washington, DC— As part of its international scientific exchange effort, the Fulbright Senior Specialists Program has awarded Carnegie scientist Marilyn Fogel a grant to share the most up-to-date findings in the fields of astrobiology and biogeochemistry with staff and students at...
STANFORD, CA-A team of scientists, led by Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, has discovered an important indicator of rain forest vulnerability to clear-cutting in Brazil. Their five-year study is the first to quantify the relationship between...
James A. Van Allen, Carnegie (DTM) alumnus and pioneering discoverer of Earth's radiation belts, has died at age 91.
Stanford, CA—Any gardener knows that different plant species mature at different times. Scientists studying natural plant communities know this phenomenon allows species to co-exist by reducing overlap so there is less competition for...
Washington, D.C. – Christopher Somerville, Director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Plant Biology, has been awarded the 2006 Balzan Prize in Plant Molecular Genetics, which he will share with his longtime collaborator,...
The Department of Terrestrial Magnetism's Sara Seager has been named one of this year's Brilliant 10 by Popular Science.
Baltimore, MD—The Lasker Foundation awarded Carnegie’s Joseph G. Gall the prestigious 2006 Lasker Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The citation recognizes that Gall is “a founder of modern cell...
Contact: Gary Kowalczyk, Director of Administration and Finance;
(202) 939-1118 or gkowalczyk@ciw.edu
Washington, D.C. — Andrew Z. Fire, a scientist who discovered RNAi, or RNA interference while at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology, along with Craig C. Mello of the University of Massachusetts...
Contact Gary Kowalczyk, 202-939-1118 or gkowalczyk@ciw.edu
See Charity Navigator details at...
The Geophysical Laboratory director Wesley T. Huntress, Jr. has received the American Astronautical Society's William...
Washington, D.C. – For the first time, astronomers have measured the day and night temperatures of a planet outside our solar system. The team,* which includes Sara Seager of Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, revealed...
The Baltimore Sun profiles high-risk research at Carnegie Institution's Department of Embryology where...
Washington, D.C. – Water, the only indispensable ingredient of life, is just about the most versatile stuff on Earth. Depending on its temperature we can heat our homes with it, bathe in it, and even strap on skates and glide across...
Washington, D.C. - The Carnegie Institution announced today that the United States Patent Office has recently granted a patent for the work of three inventors--Russell Hemley, Ho-kwang Mao, and Chih-Shiue Yan--related to the manufacture of a hard, single-crystal diamond. The...
Plant Biology's Shauna Somerville has been elected a 2006 Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Washington, D.C. - The Carnegie Institution announced today that the Carnegie board of trustees has elected Remi Barbier, founder, president & CEO of Pain Therapeutics, Inc., to their board. Pain Therapeutics is a publicly...
Stanford, CA - Scientists, including Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, have found that the Earth's global warming, 55 million years ago, may have resulted from the climate's high...
Contact: Matthew Wright at (202) 939-1142 or mwright@ciw.edu
Washington, DC – The National Academy of Sciences has awarded Carnegie president emerita Maxine F. Singer the Public Welfare Medal, the academy’s most...
Carnegie Contact: Dr. Mark Seibert, (626) 304-0273 or mseibert@ociw.edu
Pasadena, CA – Certain double, or binary, star systems erupt in full-blown explosions and then flare up with...
Stanford, Calif. – Over a span of two decades, warming temperatures have caused annual losses of roughly $5 billion for major food crops, according to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Global Ecology director Chris Field discusses his latest work, which demonstrates that global warming has already significantly affected agriculture, in a video...
The Lab-On-a-Chip, developed at Carnegie in collaboration with NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and Charles River Labs, has been successfully tested on the space...
Stanford, Calif. – Planting and protecting trees—which trap and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow—can help to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But a new study suggests that, as a way to fight global warming, the effectiveness of this strategy...
Stanford, CA.The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced this week that Carnegie’s Global Ecology department building is among the top 10 buildings in the country that are “examples of sustainable architecture and green design solutions that promote...
The President and Trustees of the Carnegie Institution
cordially invite you to view the
CARNEGIE EVENING LECTURE
...Washington, DC – Paul Silver, a geophysicist at Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, DC, was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on Friday, April 27. Out of more than 1,100 nominees, 227 were elected as Fellows.
Stanford, CA – Tropical plants are able to adapt to environmental change by extracting nitrogen from a variety of sources, according to a new study that appears in the May 7 early online edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
By demonstrating that not all plants...
According to ISI's Web of Science, two of Joe Berry's papers passed extremely high, rarefied citation milestones last week.
The following 1980 paper just passed its 1,500th citation:
Farquhar, G...
Carnegie Contact: Dr. Christopher Field
(650) 462-1047 x201 or cfield@globalecology.stanford.edu
For a copy of the paper, please contact:
AAAS Office of Public Programs; (202) 326-6440 or...
Contact Chris Field at cfield@globalecology.stanford.edu, (650) 462 1047 x 201
Contact: Russell Hemley at (202) 478-8951 or r.hemley@gl.ciw.edu;
or Ho-kwang (Dave)...
Carnegie Contact: Dr...
Dr. Greg Asner of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology discusses laser-generated topographic images in on-demand video.
Contact Tina McDowell@ 202-939-1120, or tmcdowell@ciw.edu
For image see ...
Carnegie Contact: Dr. Isamu Matsuyama
(202) 478-8863 or (matsuyama@dtm.ciw.edu)
For a copy of the paper, please contact Helen Jamison at Nature:...
Kenneth L. Franklin, who from 1954 to 1956 was a research fellow in radio astronomy at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, has died at 84 following heart surgery.
The skies over Hawaii buzz with the propellers of small aircraft. Most of them ferry people among the islands, or give tourists a glimpse of inaccessible locales. But there is one among the swarm that is unlike anything else in the sky, distinguishable from the tourist planes only by a small...
Former Embryology scientist Nina Fedoroff has won the National Medal of Science and has been named science advisor to...
Contact Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao at 202-478- 8960, or h.mao@gl.ciw.edu
Contact Russell Hemley at 202-478-8951,or rhemley@ciw.edu
...Carnegie Institution Observatories researchers are featured in Astronomy Magazine discussing dark matter and what supernovae may tell us about the fate of the universe....
Contact Gregory Asner at gpa@stanford.edu
650-380-2828, http://asnerlab.stanford.edu/...
August 15, 2007
Contact Dr. Mark Seibert
(626) 304-0273 or mseibert@ociw.edu
For a copy of the paper, please contact Helen Jamison at Nature: h....
Carnegie Contact: Dr. Winslow Briggs;
(650) 325-1521 x207 or briggs@stanford.edu
For a copy of the paper, please contact:
AAAS Office of Public Programs; (202) 326-6440 or ...
Plant Biology's Winslow R. Briggs, was awarded the 2007 Adolph E. Gude, Jr., Award. The award was established by the American Society of Plant Biologists and first...
Washington DC*-- Key components of a new approach to discover life on Mars were successfully launched into space...
The Carnegie Institution’s new look, featured on this new Web site, helps identify who we are clearly and concisely. By closely associating “Carnegie” and “science” in our new logo, our core identity is obvious in the blink of an eye. Although we have made every...
Washington, D.C. In the first experiments able to mimic the crushing, searing conditions found in Earth’s lower mantle, and simultaneously probe tell-...
The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) Consortium* announces that the GMT will be constructed at Cerro Las Campanas, Chile. This location was selected for its high altitude, dry climate, dark skies, and unsurpassed seeing quality, as...
Senior trustee William T. Golden died on Sunday October 7 at the age of 97. Bill Golden was an icon of American science policy, and the Carnegie Institution was privileged to have his support and guidance for more than 35 years. Dedicated, passionate, and always involved, Bill...
Genes of a tiny, single-celled green alga called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii may contain scores more data about the common ancestry of plants and animals than the richest paleontological dig. This work is described in an article in the October 12, 2007, issue of Science...
Former Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE) director Inés Cifuentes has won this year’s Hispanic Heritage Award for Math and Science. Instituted by the White House in 1987, the Hispanic Heritage Awards are the most prestigious Hispanic honors in America...
Carnegie scientists Chris Field and Ken Caldeira of the Department of Global Ecology are key contributors in the UN panel awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on October 12 for work on global climate change. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shares...
Greg Asner of the Department of Global Ecology has been picked by Popular Science magazine as one of its annual “Brillant 10.” According to the magazine’s November issue, Brilliant 10 researchers “challenge what we thought it was possible to know,” and Asner “created a...
The Norwegian Embassy brings together scientists from both sides of the Atlantic for its Annual Science Week at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. Among the topics discussed will be the science that...
Stanford, CA -- Human activities are releasing carbon dioxide faster than ever, while the natural processes that normally slow its build up in the atmosphere appear to be weakening. These...
Ken Caldeira, of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, has an Op Ed piece about how to cool the planet in the October 24, 2007, New York Times. See ...
The Center for the Built Environment—an organization where industry leaders and researchers cooperate to produce substantial, holistic, and far-sighted research on buildings—awarded the Department of Global Ecology building...
The first “State of the Carbon Cycle Report” for North America, released online this week by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, finds the continent’s carbon budget increasingly overwhelmed by human-caused emissions. North American sources release nearly 2 billion...
Pasadena CA—Typically, little M-dwarf stars—the most common type of star in the galaxy—are cold, quiet, and dim. Now a team of astronomers led by Edo Berger, a Carnegie-Princeton postdoctoral fellow, found one M-dwarf that doesn’t conform. It has an unusually active and complex...
Chris Field is one of 25 researchers who will attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and banquet on Dec. 10 in Oslo, Norway. See...
Stanford, CA — Carbon emissions from human activities are not just heating up the globe, they are changing the ocean’s chemistry. This could soon be fatal to coral reefs, which are havens for marine biodiversity and underpin the economies of many coastal...
January 1, 2008
Speaker: Simon Levin
A sustainable future for humanity will require finding a way to share our complex environment. Learn about the evolution of cooperation in non-human populations, and what must change in our own behaviors if we are to have a common future.
Washington, DC— Astronomers at the Carnegie Institution have found the first indications of highly complex organic molecules in the disk of red dust surrounding a distant star. The eight-million-year-old star, known as HR 4796A, is inferred to be in the late stages of planet...
Plate tectonics, the geologic process responsible for creating the Earth’s continents, mountain ranges, and ocean basins, may be an on-again, off-again affair. Scientists have assumed that the shifting of crustal plates has been slow but continuous over most of the Earth’s history,...
January 17, 2008
Michael Brown
California Institute of Technology, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
Pluto is no longer a planet. Did it really have it coming or are astronomers just cosmic bullies? What else is out there at the edge of the solar system? Are...
After a journey of more than 2.2 billion miles and three and a half years, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft made its first flyby of Mercury just after 2 PM Eastern Standard Time on January 14, 2008. All seven scientific instruments...
A discovery by scientists at the Carnegie Institution has opened the door to a new generation of piezoelectric materials that can convert mechanical strain into electricity and vice versa, potentially cutting costs and boosting performance in myriad applications ranging from medical...
Long-time Carnegie Institution trustee William T. Golden was honored on January 25 by a symposium held in the institution's auditorium. Friends and colleagues recollected his decades of service to the institution, the nation, and the nearly 100 other organizations to which he lent his...
Stanford, CA — Now that scientists have reached a consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are the major cause of global warming, the next question is: How can we stop it? Can we just cut back on carbon, or do we need to go cold turkey?...
Washington, DC — Interstellar space may be strewn with tiny whiskers of carbon, dimming the light of far-away objects. This discovery by scientists at the Carnegie Institution may have implications for the “dark energy” hypothesis, proposed a decade ago in part to explain the...
Stanford, CA — A startling discovery by scientists at the Carnegie Institution puts a new twist on photosynthesis, arguably the most important biological process on Earth. Photosynthesis by plants, algae, and some bacteria supports nearly all living things by...
Former Carnegie president and trustee Philip Abelson “had at least nine scientific lives…” Read this memoir appearing in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. http://www....
Washington, DC—The organic soup that spawned life on Earth may have gotten generous helpings from outer space, according to a new study. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have discovered concentrations of amino acids in two meteorites that are more than ten...
CarnegieScience is the newsletter of the Carnegie Institution for Science. It comes out three times a year and features Carnegie science and other activitities.
Stanford, CA—The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting—possibly in response to global warming. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution determined that over a 23-...
Stanford, CA— Over millions of years carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been moderated by a finely tuned natural feedback system—a system that human emissions have recently overwhelmed. A joint University of Hawaii/Carnegie Institution study published in...
Carnegie's First Light Saturday school students celebrate DNA Day by...
Washington, DC—Superconductors can convey more than 150 times more electricity than copper wires because they don’t restrict electron movement, the essence of electricity. But to do this, the materials have to be cooled below a very low, so-called, transition...
Pasadena, CA. Astronomers have seen the aftermath of spectacular stellar explosions known as supernovae before, but until now no one has witnessed a star dying in real time. While looking at another object in the spiral galaxy NGC...
Tropical rain forests are treasure houses of biodiversity, but there has been no effective way to inventory and monitor their plant species over large areas. As a result, we have limited understanding of how climate change, clearing, invasive plants, and other threats are affecting...
Allan C. Spradling, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology, has been awarded the 2008 Genetics Prize by the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation in recognition of his contributions to fruit fly genomics and for “fundamental discoveries about the earliest...
Washington, D.C.—The world’s richest source of platinum and related metals is an enigmatic geological structure in South Africa known as the Bushveld Complex. This complex of ancient magmas is known to have formed so...
CarnegieScience is the newsletter of the Carnegie Institution for Science. It comes out three times a year and features Carnegie science and other activitities.
Stanford, CA— Nitrogen is essential to all life on Earth, and the processes by which it cycles through the environment may determine how ecosystems respond to global warming. But certain aspects of the nitrogen cycle in temperate and tropical forests have puzzled scientists, defying...
Geophysical Laboratory director Russell Hemley will participate in the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF)
The Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) will take place this summer in Barcelona, from 18 to 22 July. ESOF2008 is not just a scientific conference. More than 400 international experts will contribute to the sessions in the different...
Stanford, CA...
Washington, D.C.—Higher than expected levels of sodium found in a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite suggest that the dust clouds from which the building blocks of the Earth and neighboring planets formed were much denser than previously supposed. The study, by...
Stanford, CA—Biofuels can be a sustainable part of the world’s energy future, especially if bioenergy agriculture is developed on currently abandoned or degraded agricultural lands, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University. Using these...
It’s not just about climate change anymore. Besides loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases, human emissions of carbon dioxide have also begun to alter the chemistry of the ocean—often called the cradle of life on Earth. The ecological and economic consequences...
Paul Silver discusses his research in a video interview.
...
Washington, D.C....
Washington, D.C.— Carnegie geochemist Richard Carlson will receive the 2008 Norman L. Bowen Award from the American Geophysical Union. Named in honor of pioneering experimental petrologist and long-time Geophysical Laboratory staff member Norman Bowen, the award is given annually...
Stanford, CA—Steroids bulk up plants just as they do human athletes, but the playbook of molecular signals that tell the genes to boost growth and development in plant cells is far more complicated than in human and animal cells. A new study by plant biologists at...
Baltimore, MD...
Listen to the lecture here:
iTunes U
Download the Powerpoint presentation here:...
Washington, D.C.— Nitrogen atoms like to travel in pairs, hooked together by one of the strongest chemical bonds in nature. By subjecting nitrogen molecules to extreme temperatures and pressures scientists are getting a new understanding of not only nitrogen but other...
Selecting life: Scientists find new way to search for origin of life - Carnegie Institution News
Stanford, CA—How much carbon dioxide is too much? According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere need to be stabilized at levels low enough to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate...
September 25, 2008
Speaker: Eric Roston and James Gustave Speth
Eric Roston - Duke University, The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Author of The Carbon Age: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilization’s Greatest Threat
James Gustave Speth - Yale...
Washington, D.C.—Canadian bedrock more than four billion years old may be the oldest known section of the Earth’s early crust. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution used geochemical methods to obtain an age of 4.28 billion years for samples of the rock, making...
Washington, D.C.—For several decades, scientists have thought that the Solar...
Washington, D.C.— Robert Hazen, senior staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, will receive the 2009 Distinguished Public Service Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America. Hazen researches the possible roles of minerals in the...
Washington, D.C.—The building blocks of life may have emerged in volcanic eruptions on the early Earth, according to a new analysis of classic experiments performed more than fifty years ago. Using modern techniques to examine samples from the original experiments,...
Carnegie's Wes Huntress joins other space community leaders to form an alternative...
Washington, D.C.— Researchers at the Carnegie Institution have developed a new technique for improving the properties of diamonds—not only adding sparkle to gemstones, but also simplifying the process of making high-quality diamond for scalpel blades, electronic...
Gliding over the battered surface of Mercury for the second time this year, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has revealed even more previously unseen real estate on the innermost planet, sending home hundreds of photos and measurements of its...
Stanford, CA— In submitted testimony to the British Parliament, climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution said that while steep cuts in carbon emissions are essential to stabilizing global climate, there also needs to be a backup plan. Geoengineering...
Will the changing jet stream produce more hurricanes? Have researchers discovered an earthquake predictor? Read the fall 2008 CarnegieScience to find out.
Engineering better crops on...
The key to understanding Earth’s evolution, including how our atmosphere gained oxygen and how volcanoes and earthquakes form, is to look deep, really deep, into the...
Scientists may have overcome a major hurdle to calculating how much carbon dioxide (CO2) is absorbed and released by plants, vital information for understanding how...
"Dove Courtesy of Chlorophyll Fluorescence Analysis"
This year's winning holiday card was submitted by Shaun Bailey and Blaise Hamel from the Department of Plant Biology.
The dove design on the leaf was made...
Researchers have discovered that the ocean’s chemical makeup is less stable and more greatly affected by climate change than previously believed. The researchers report in the December 12, 2008 issue of Science* that during a time of climate change 13 million years...
Washington, D.C.-The Carnegie Institution has been awarded a $9,400 grant from the Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics, to preserve and enhance access to a collection of historic photographs of scientific instruments and...
Washington D.C.—Christopher B. Field, director of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, and Douglas E. Koshland, staff scientist at the Department of Embryology, have been elected AAAS Fellows by...
The Carnegie Institution is now on Apple's iTunesU. Lectures, interviews, news, and information about the institution are available through the popular, free application and mobile learning site. Learn more about iTunes and...
Pasadena, CA...
Stanford, CA—A lack of technology needed to explore and monitor vast regions of tropical rain forest has been a critical...
Baltimore, MD—Stem cells are the body’s primal cells, retaining the youthful ability to develop into more specialized types of cells over many cycles of cell division. How do they do it? Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have identified a gene, named scrawny,...
Washington, D.C. Two independent groups have simultaneously made the first-ever ground-based detection of extrasolar planets thermal emissions. Until now, virtually everything known about atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars in the Milky...
January 20, 2009
Speaker: Steven Beckwith
Do you ever question the Big Bang? The Hubble Space Telescope has now looked far enough back in time to reveal the universe when it was very young and shows how different it really looked.
Pasadena, CA- Dr. George W. Preston of the Carnegie Observatories has been selected by the American Astronomical Society to be the 2009 recipient of its highest distinction: the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship. The Russell Lectureship is...
Washington, D.C....
January 27, 2009
A documentary film about Eric Kandel by Petra Seeger FilmForm Köln, 2008
Join us for a screening of producer/director Petra Seeger’s documentary film about the life and accomplishments of neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for...
Washington, D.C.-Here on Earth we worry about our planet's atmosphere warming by a few degrees on average over the next century, and even weather fronts bring temporary changes in temperature of no more than tens of degrees....
Stanford, CA—...
Washington, D.C.— An international team of researchers including scientists at the Carnegie Institution has discovered a new chemical compound that consists of a single element―boron....
Baltimore, MD...
February 12, 2009
Saturn’s moon, Titan, is covered by a thick organic haze that completely shrouds the surface from view. Such a mysterious haze might have also been present on Earth billions of years ago. Comparing the hazes that form in these two distant lands can help us learn...
Washington, D.C.— In recent years researchers have...
Stanford, CA— Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising more rapidly than expected, increasing the danger that without aggressive action to reduce emissions the...
Pasadena, CA—Evidence of star birth within a cloud of...
The National Space Club will be awarding the 2009 Nelson P. Jackson Award to the “The MESSENGER spacecraft flybys.” Director of Terrestrial Magnetism and principal investigator of the mission Sean Solomon will attend the...
Stanford, CA— The African savanna is world famous for its wildlife, especially the iconic large herbivores such as elephants, zebras, and giraffes. But...
Stanford, CA—One of the rationales behind basic research is to provide the scientific foundations for good public policy. Carnegie scientists have always done their share, but the Department of Global Ecology...
Washington, D.C.—Ever since the Bronze Age, humans...
Stanford, CA— Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere...
Stanford, CA—Rolling Stone magazine has ranked Global Ecology'...
Washington, D.C.—Unraveling the origins of...
100 Hours of Astronomy (100HA) is a worldwide celebration to involving the public in the excitement of...
Washington, D.C.— The Earth’s original atmosphere held very little oxygen. This began to change around 2.4 billion years ago when oxygen levels increased dramatically...
Pasadena, CA —Using information from a suite of telescopes, astronomers have discovered a mysterious, giant object that existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. Objects such as this one are dubbed extended Lyman-Alpha blobs;...
Washington, DC—The most powerful earthquakes happen at the junction of two converging...
Analyses of data from the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft’s second flyby of Mercury in October 2008 show that the planet’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and geological past are all characterized by much greater levels...
STANFORD, CA - Biofuels such as ethanol offer an alternative to petroleum for powering our cars, but growing energy crops to produce them can compete with food crops for farmland, and clearing forests to expand farmland will aggravate the climate change problem. How can we...
Pasadena, CA—The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation awarded the 2009 Cosmology Prize to Carnegie’s Wendy Freedman; Robert Kennicutt...
Argonne, IL—Millions of people today carry around pocket-sized music players capable of holding thousands of songs, thanks to the discovery 20 years ago of a phenomenon known as the “giant...
Washington, DC—...
Palo Alto, CA—Cellulose is a fibrous molecule that makes up plant cell walls, gives...
Washington, D.C. To combat the trend of declining qualified mathematics teachers in middle and high...
In the future, will wind power tapped by high-flying kites light up New York? A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution and California State University identifies New York as a prime location for exploiting high-altitude winds, which globally...
Emergency plans to counteract global warming by artificially shading the Earth from incoming sunlight might lower the planet’s temperature a few degrees, but such “geoengineering” solutions would...
Palo Alto, CA—A tiny plant with a long name (Arabidopsis thaliana) helps researchers from over 120 countries learn how to design...
Baltimore, MD—Scientists working at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Embryology, with colleagues, have overturned previous research that identified critical genes for making muscle stem cells. It turns out that the genes that make muscle stem cells in the...
Palo Alto, CA— When glaciers advanced over much of the Earth’s surface during the last ice age, what kept the planet from freezing over entirely? This has been a puzzle to climate scientists because leading models have indicated that over the past 24 million...
Washington, D.C.— The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Carnegie Institution a $4 million grant over three years to initiate the Deep Carbon Observatory -- an international, decade-long project to investigate the nature of carbon in Earth's deep interior. Headquartered at the...
See the entire summer 2009 CarnegieScience here Summer 2009 newsletter
Washington, DC—The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments...
Pasadena, CA-The Australian government has announced that it will provide $88.4 million AUD ($72.4 million USD) to help fund the revolutionary 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) to be sited at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s high-altitude...
Palo Alto, CA—With the information explosion, it’s remarkable that so little is known about the interactions that proteins have with each other and the protective membrane that surrounds a cell. These interactive, so-called membrane proteins regulate nutrients and...
Seismologist and geophysicist Paul Gordon Silver, at Terrestrial Magnetism, died in an automobile accident in
Washington, D.C.—Scientist, teacher, and co-director of the Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE), Toby Horn, will receive the 2009 Bruce Alberts Award for Excellence in Science...
Washington, D.C.—On August 24, Moody’s Investors Service affirmed its highest rating—Aaa/VMIG1—on the Carnegie Institution’s Series 1993, 2002, and 2006 bonds. Only 37 other higher education institutions and not-for-profit organizations are...
Palo Alto, CA—The future of the Earth could rest on potentially dangerous and unproven geoengineering technologies unless emissions of carbon dioxide can be greatly reduced, a new study has found.
The report (published September 1, by the Royal Society, the UK...
The Carnegie-founded Mt. Wilson Observatory was home to the most important astronomical discoveries of the 20th century. Carnegie astronomer Edwin Hubble shattered our old concepts of the universe with his discoveries that there are galaxies other than the Milky Way and that universe is...
Palo Alto, CA— Christopher Field , director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology ,* has been awarded a...
Palo Alto, CA— Director Emeritus of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology, Winslow Briggs, will be awarded the prestigious International...
Washington, D.C.—Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found a way to monitor the strength of geologic faults deep in the Earth. This finding could prove to be a boon for ...
In a recent interview, scientist and director of Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology, Chris Field, describes the historic shift taking place in the production of...
Greg Asner peers out an open window, taking stock of the jungle as the single-engine prop plane chugs over a pair of scarlet macaws gliding among the treetops 120 metres below. The Peruvian Amazon stretches in all directions, painted in countless shades of green,...
Dust samples collected by high-flying aircraft in the upper atmosphere have yielded an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos, report scientists from the Carnegie Institution. The stratospheric dust includes minute grains that likely formed inside...
Can global warming be mitigated by a technological fix such as injecting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere or chemically “scrubbing” excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere? Department of Global Ecology scientist ...
Pasadena, CA—Astronomers, conducting the broadest survey to date of galaxies from about 800 million years after the Big Bang, have found 22 early galaxies and confirmed the age of one by its characteristic hydrogen signature at 787 million years...
Washington, D.C.— Much of our planet’s mineral wealth was deposited billions of years ago when Earth’s chemical cycles were different from today’s. Using geochemical clues from rocks nearly 3 billion years old, a group of...
Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found for the first time that high pressure can be used to make a unique hydrogen-storage material. The discovery paves the way for an entirely new way to approach the hydrogen-storage problem. The researchers found that the...
Photosynthetic organisms need to cope with a wide range of light intensities, which can change over timescales of seconds to minutes. Too much light can damage the photosynthetic machinery and cause cell death. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution were part of a...
Hawaii may be paradise for vacationers, but for geologists it has long been a puzzle. Plate tectonic theory readily explains the existence of volcanoes at boundaries where plates split apart or collide, but mid-plate volcanoes such as those that built the Hawaiian...
This image was selected as our holiday card for 2009. It is a portion of AraNet, a gene association network built from over 50 million data points of functional genomics data from the experimental mustard plant Arabidopsis. Each line represents a functional link between two genes and...
Palo Alto, CA—Tropical forest destruction accounts for some 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But quantifying these emissions has not been easy, particularly for tropical nations. New technology, developed by a team of scientists at Carnegie’s...
Washington, D.C. — Two nearby stars have been found to harbor “super-Earths”― rocky planets larger than the Earth but smaller than ice giants such as Uranus and Neptune. Unlike previously discovered stars with super-Earths, both of the stars are similar to...
Palo Alto, CA—Scientists at the Carnegie Institution, with colleagues,* have found that a plant steroid prompts two genes to battle each other—one suppresses the other to ensure that leaves grow normally in rice and the experimental...
Audio Press Release
Global warming is causing climate belts to shift toward the poles and to higher elevations. To keep pace with these changes, the average ecosystem will need to shift about a quarter...
See image and caption http://www.ciw.edu/ prlabbehudfz7andz8picbig1_4_10_jpg
Pasadena, CA—Astronomers, using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, have broken the distance limit...
Washington, DC—Former chairman of the Carnegie board of trustees and former chairman of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company died after a long illness on Sunday, January 3, at his home in Pennsylvania. Heckert was born in Oxford, Ohio, on January 13, 1924. Son of a...
Washington, D.C.—Physicists have long wondered whether hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, could be transformed into a metal and possibly even a superconductor—the elusive state in which electrons can flow without resistance. They have speculated that under...
January 28, 2010
Jenny Graves The Australian National University, Research School of Biological Sciences
Dr. Richard A. Meserve became the ninth president of the Carnegie Institution in April 2003, after stepping down as Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Meserve had been a member of Carnegie's board of trustees since 1992.
As Chairman of the NRC, Meserve...
Palo Alto, CA—Scientists have created a new computational model that can be used to predict gene function of uncharacterized plant genes with unprecedented speed and accuracy. The network, dubbed AraNet, has over 19,600 genes associated to each other by over 1 million...
Washington, D.C.— Carnegie scientists Kenneth Caldeira of the Department of Global Ecology, Yingwei Fei of the Geophysical Laboratory, and Steven Shirey of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism have been elected 2010 Fellows of the American...
Pasadena, CA— Astronomers have found the first clear evidence of a binary quasar within a pair of actively merging galaxies. Quasars are the extremely bright centers of galaxies surrounding super-massive black holes, and binary quasars are pairs...
"Above all, we hope readers will come to appreciate that the risks of climate change are not merely academic or theoretical. Pacific Gas and Electric Company is just one company where these challenges aredramatically altering plans for the future. They are driving new multibillion-dollar...
A newly discovered star outside the Milky Way has yielded important clues about the evolution of our galaxy. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 280,000 light-years away, the star has a chemical make-up similar to the Milky Way’s oldest stars, supporting theories that our galaxy...
A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science finds that over a third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumption of goods and services in many developed countries are actually emitted outside...
Metallic glasses are emerging as potentially useful materials at the frontier of materials science research. They combine the advantages and avoid many of the problems of normal metals and glasses, two classes of materials with a very wide range of applications. For example,...
Palo Alto, CA—To engineer better, more productive crops and develop new drugs to combat disease, scientists look at how the sensor-laden membranes surrounding cells control nutrient and water uptake, secrete toxins, and interact with the environment and neighboring cells...
Multipotent stem cells have the capacity to develop into different types of cells by reprogramming their DNA to turn on different combinations of genes, a process called “differentiation.” In a new study, researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science have...
Palo Alto, CA— Christopher Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, is among the two hundred and twenty-nine leaders in...
Baltimore, MD—Douglas E. Koshland, staff scientist at Carnegie’s Department of Embryology, has been elected as one of 72 new members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his excellence in original scientific research. Membership in the NAS is one of the highest honors...
April 28, 2010
Speaker: Raymond Jeanloz
Diamonds and lasers are used to re-create the extreme conditions present when planets are born – conditions that remain, billions of years later, deep inside giant and super-giant planets. These experiments reveal new information not...
Baltimore, MD—More than 25 years ago, Dianne Williams of Baltimore was hired by Carnegie’s Department of Embryology to wash lab dishes as part of a city job program for inner city youth. Now as head technician and manager of a Drosophila research lab, and with two...
Palo Alto, CA— Trees and other plants help keep the planet cool, but rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are turning down this global air conditioner. According to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, in some regions more than...
Washington, D.C.—An unprecedented study of bald eagle diet, from about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago to the present, will provide wildlife managers with unique information for reintroducing Bald Eagles to the Channel Islands off California. The scientists, including...
Baltimore, MD— Proteins called cohesins ensure that newly copied chromosomes bind together, separate correctly during cell division, and are repaired efficiently after DNA damage. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution have found for the first time that cohesins are needed in different...
Washington, D.C. — The evolution of complex life forms may have gotten a jump start billions of years ago, when geologic events operating over millions of years caused large quantities of phosphorus to wash into the oceans. According to this model, proposed in a new paper by...
Washington, D.C. At its annual May meeting, the Carnegie Institution for Science board of trustees enthusiastically endorsed the construction of the proposed Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The GMT will be the first in the next generation of astronomical observatories that will drive new...
A team of astronomers including Ivelina Momcheva of the Carnegie Observatories has discovered the most distant cluster of galaxies ever found. In a surprising twist, the young...
Tiny variations in the isotopic composition of silver in meteorites and Earth rocks are helping scientists put together a timetable of how our planet was assembled beginning 4.568 billion years ago. The new study, published in the journal Science, indicates that water and other key...
Washington, D.C.—Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, with colleagues, have discovered a much higher water content in the Moon’s interior than previous studies. Their research suggests that the water, which is a component of the lunar rocks, was...
The Green Revolution of the late 20th century increased crop yields worldwide and helped feed an expanding global population. According to a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it also has helped...
One proposed emergency fix to halt global warming is to seed clouds over the ocean to make them more reflective, reducing the solar radiation absorbed by the Earth. But the scheme could also change global rainfall patterns, raising concerns of water shortages on land. A new study by the...
Up to now scientists thought that the trace amounts of carbon on the surface of the Moon came from the solar wind. Now researchers at the Carnegie Institution...
With carbon dioxide in the atmosphere approaching alarming levels, even halting emissions altogether may not be enough to avert catastrophic climate change. Could scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air be a viable solution? A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution suggests that while...
On the inside:
Carbon Emissions "Outsourced" to Developing Countries p. 5
Bald Eagles:Isotope Analysis Meets Conservation p. 8
Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph Reveals Earliest Known Galaxy Cluster p. 12
For Stem Cells, Practice...
Palo Alto, CA—A tiny, little-understood plant pore has enormous implications for weather forecasting, climate change, agriculture, hydrology, and more. A study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the Research Center Jülich in Germany,...
Leonard Searle, astronomer and director emeritus of Carnegie Observatories, died at his home on July 2, 2010, in Pasadena, CA, in the midst of a busy retirement that followed a long, distinguished scientific career.
Searle was born on October 23, 1930, in the London suburb of Mitcham to...
Analysis of data from MESSENGER’s third and final flyby of Mercury in September 2009 has revealed evidence of younger volcanism on the innermost planet than previously recognized, new information about magnetic substorms, and the first observations of emission from an ionized species in Mercury’...
The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) Corporation is pleased to announce that the University of Chicago has joined the partnership that will construct the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), a state of the art astronomical observatory. The GMT will be used to address fundamental...
Washington, D.C.—Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) staff member Larry Nittler has been elected a fellow of the Meteoritical Society. Society fellows are “members who have...
Palo Alto, CA—The private sector and an Austrian research institute are chipping in to help support one of the most widely used public biological databases in the world. Although the majority of funding continues to come from the National Science Foundation, The Arabidopsis Information Resource...
Palo Alto, CA—By 2100 only 18% to 45% of the plants and animals making up ecosystems in global, humid tropical forests may remain as we know them today, according to a new study led by Greg Asner at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. The research combined new deforestation...
Scientists have discovered a new window into the Earth's violent past. Geochemical evidence from volcanic rocks collected on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic suggests that beneath it lies a region of the Earth's mantle that has largely escaped the billions of years of melting and geological...
Image Link http://www.dtm.ciw.edu/users/sheppard/L5trojan/
Washington, D.C.—There are places in space where the gravitational tug between a planet and the Sun balance out, allowing other smaller bodies to...
With Video
Washington, D.C.—Superconductors can carry electricity without resistance, so they are more efficient than copper wires. However, to attain the superconducting state, these materials have to be cooled below a critical temperature, so-called transition...
Baltimore, MD—The innovative, educational, outreach program BioEYES has now been adopted by Monash University and the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute. The down-under partnership program debuts this August. BioEYES is designed to foster an interest in...
Spanish version http://carnegiescience.edu/news/progreso_excepcional_en_el_mapeo_de_carbono
Palo Alto, CA—By integrating satellite mapping, airborne-laser technology, and ground-based plot surveys,...
Palo Alto, CA—Using sophisticated airborne imaging and structural analysis, scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology mapped more than 40,000 termite mounds over 192 square miles in the African savanna. They found that their size and distribution is linked to...
Palo Alto, CA- Mediante la integración de mapeo satélital, tecnología láser aerotransportada, y estudios a nivel de parcelas, los científicos de la Institución Carnegie Departamento de Ecología de Global, con colegas del Fondo Mundial para la Naturaleza WWF y en coordinación con el Ministerio...
Access to the study available through the Steve Davis site
Stanford, CA— Scientists have warned that avoiding dangerous climate change this century will require steep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. New energy-efficient or carbon-free...
High rez image http://carnegiescience.edu/climate_model_results_relative_lowco2_climate
Palo Alto, CA—Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology have taken...
Washington, D.C—The Carnegie Institution for Science posted an 11% return on its investments for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2010. As of today, the institution’s endowment stands at approximately $700 million, or 15% above the low experienced in March of 2009.
Carnegie had the...
Washington, D.C. Astronomers have found a new, potentially habitable Earth-sized planet. It is one of two new planets discovered around the star Gliese 581, some 20 light years away. The planet, Gliese 581g, is located in a “habitable zone”—a distance from the star where the planet receives just...
Palo Alto, CA—Geologists have found evidence that some 55 million years ago a river as big as the modern Colorado flowed through Arizona into Utah in the opposite direction from the present-day river. Writing in the October issue of the journal Geology, they have named this ancient northeastward...
LINK TO MOVIES
http://deepgreen.stanford.edu/cell%20imaging%20site%20/html/microtubules.html
Palo Alto, CA— Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, with...
Palo Alto, CA— Director Emeritus of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology, Winslow Briggs,has been elected an Einstein Professor by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). The professorship program annually awards 20 distinguished international scientists the honor. The recipients participate in...
Argonne, ILL—For the first time scientists have been able to watch nanoparticles grow from the earliest stages of their formation. Nanoparticles are the foundation of nanotechnology and their performance depends on their structure, composition, and size. Researchers will now be...
Washington, D.C.—Carnegie biogeochemist Marilyn Fogel, developmental biologist Marnie Halpern, and astronomer Stella Kafka were selected from over 500 applicants to be USA Science & Engineering Festival “Nifty Fifty” lecturers. The first USA Science & Engineering Festival is being held...
Palo Alto, CA— Scientists have known for some time how important plant steroids called brassinosteroids are for regulating plant growth and development. But until now, they did not know how extensive their reach is. Now researchers, including Yu Sun and Zhi-Yong Wang at Carnegie’s Department of...
Pasadena, CA— Allan R. Sandage, Edwin Hubble’s former observing assistant and one of the most prominent astronomers of the last century, died November 13, 2010, at home in San Gabriel, California, of pancreatic cancer.
Born in Iowa City, Iowa, June 18, 1926, Sandage grew up to define the...
Palo Alto, CA— Infestation by bacteria and other pathogens result in global crop losses of over $500 billion annually. A research team led by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Plant Biology developed a novel trick for identifying how pathogens hijack plant nutrients to...
Washington, D.C.—A group at the Geophysical Laboratory (GL) and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), who share the Broad Branch Road (BBR) campus in Washington, have been recognized by So Others Might Eat (SOME) for serving the “hungry and homeless of Washington for...
Palo Alto, CA— Plants are very sensitive to light conditions because light is their source of energy and also a signal that activates the special photoreceptors that regulate growth, metabolism, and physiological development. Scientists believe that these light signals control...
Video Press Release
Washington, D.C.—Scientists from all over the world are taking a second, more expansive, look at the car-sized asteroid that exploded over Sudan's Nubian Desert in 2008....
Video Press Release
Washington, D.C. — Sophisticated tools allow scientists to subject the basic elements of matter to conditions drastic enough to modify their behavior. By doing this, they can expand...
Washington, D.C.—Carnegie Observatories director Wendy Freedman has been selected as an AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The announcement will appear Jan. 11 on the AAAS...
Some 55% of tropical forests are negatively affected by land use practices and deforestation worldwide. But the ability to penetrate the canopy to see what’s going on has been lacking until now. Global Ecology’s Greg Asner’s group has developed new airborne methods to peer through the canopy to...
Video Press Release
Stanford, CA— Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline. The Black Death, on the other hand, came and...
Palo Alto, CA— Plant biologists have discovered the last major element of the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell’s nucleus. Although many steps of the pathway were...
Pasadena, CA— Astronomers have pushed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to it limits by finding what they believe to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe—at a distance of 13.2 billion light years, some 3% of the age of universe. This places the object roughly 150 million light years...
In the 1950s, biochemist Stanley Miller performed a series of experiments to demonstrate that organic compounds could be created under conditions mimicking the primordial Earth. Some unused samples from Miller’s research were recently uncovered by a team of scientists, including Jim Cleaves, of...
Washington, D.C.—Surprising new research shows that, contrary to conventional belief, remains of chitin-protein complex—structural materials containing protein and polysaccharide—are present in abundance in fossils of arthropods from the Paleozoic era. Previously the oldest...
The Global Ecology team recently completed the airborne phase of a new project to map 35 million acres of tropical forest in the Colombian Amazon. The project seeks to quantify the carbon composition of the underexplored Colombian Amazon, and at the same time, to support Colombia’s environment...
Washington, D.C.—Chemical compounds called manganites have been studied for many years since the discovery of colossal magnetoresistance, a property that promises important applications in the fields of magnetic sensors, magnetic random access memories and spintronic devices....
The MESSENGER spacecraft has captured the first portrait of our Solar System from the inside looking out. Comprised of 34 images, the mosaic provides a complement to the Solar System portrait – that one from...
Washington, D.C.—The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has issued a patent to the Carnegie Institution for a method of creating high quality diamond crystals larger than 10 carats.
Patent number 7,883,684 was developed by Carnegie ...
Sean Solomon, Terrestrial Magnetism’s director, is the principal investigator of the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) mission, which is sending the first spacecraft to orbit the innermost planet, Mercury. It’s been a long wait. The craft required an...
See press release from the Applied Physics Laboratory. They built the craft and manage the mission.
Washington, D.C.— In the 1950s, biochemist Stanley Miller performed a series of experiments to demonstrate that organic compounds could be created under conditions mimicking the primordial Earth. Some unused samples from Miller’s research were recently uncovered by a team of...
Washington, D.C.—Recent climate modeling has shown that reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would give the Earth a wetter climate in the short term. New research from Carnegie Global Ecology scientists Long Cao and Ken Caldeira offers a novel...
Washington, D.C.—Formaldehyde, a poison and a common molecule throughout the universe, is likely the source of the solar system’s organic carbon solids—abundant in both comets and asteroids. Scientists have long speculated about the how organic, or carbon-containing, material...
Washington, D.C.–On Monday, April 4, 2011, Tufts University School of Engineering presented Richard A. Meserve, president of the Carnegie Institution and a Tufts University alumnus, the first Vannevar Bush Dean’s Medal. The award includes a commemorative medal and plaque, and a public lecture....
Washington, D.C. — Although its name may make many people think of flowers, the element germanium is part of a frequently studied group of elements, called IVa, which could have applications for next-generation computer architecture as well as implications for fundamental...
Palo Alto, CA—Scientists have known for decades that black carbon aerosols add to global warming. These airborne particles made of sooty carbon are believed to be among the largest man-made contributors to global warming because they absorb solar radiation and heat the atmosphere. New research...
Palo Alto, CA—Brazilians are world leaders in using biofuels for gasoline. About A quarter of their automobile fuel consumption comes from sugarcane, which significantly reduces carbon dioxide emissions that otherwise would be emitted from using gasoline. Now scientists from the...
Washington, D.C.—Paul Butler of Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his discovery of more than half of the known planets orbiting nearby stars.
212 leaders in science, the arts, social science, the...
Washington, D.C. Mitsui Career Development Associate Professor of Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Linda Elkins-Tanton, will become the seventh director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM). She succeeds retiring Sean C. Solomon who...
Washington, D.C. The credit-rating agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P) has reaffirmed the Carnegie Institution for Science’s AA+ long-term rating and stable outlook. It is the second highest rating given by the organization.
S&P’s credit rating provides an independent evaluation...
Palo Alto, CA— Accurately calculating the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the process of producing and bringing products to our doorsteps is nearly impossible, but still a worthwhile effort, two Carnegie researchers claim in a commentary published online this week by ...
Washington, DC— Scientists have long debated about the origin of carbon in Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks and how it might signal the remnants of the earliest forms of life on the planet. New research by a team including five scientists from Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory...
Pasadena, CA- George P. Mitchell, founder of Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. and The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, has committed an unprecedented $25-million gift to the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project. Half of the gift, $12.5 million, has been donated to the Carnegie...
Carnegie president Richard Meserve has been elected to a three-year term as councillor of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) beginning July 1, 2011. The academy, founded in 1964, is a private, independent, nonprofit organization that provides advice to the federal government on...
Washington, D.C.—The Moon has much more water than previously thought, a team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Erik Hauri has discovered. Their research, published May 26 in Science Express, shows that...
Washington, DC— Carbonaceous chondrites are a type of organic-rich meteorite that contain samples of the materials that took part in the creation of our planets nearly 4.6 billion years ago, including materials that were likely formed before our Solar System was created and may...
Carnegie welcomes four new staff researchers. Anna M. Michalak joins the Department of Global Ecology. Prior to joining Carnegie, she was the Frank and Brooke Transue Faculty Scholar and an associate professor at the University of...
Launching the next generation Carnegie Airborne Observatory
Thursday, June 2, 2011 —Greg Asner and his team unveiled the latest version of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO-II), an aircraft that combines laser and spectrometer remote sensing technologies, along with high-tech...
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu visited Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) on Friday, June 3. Russell Hemley, Director of Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory, presented an overview of the High Pressure Collaborative Access Team (HPCAT) and led the tour for the delegation, which also...
Palo Alto, CA— Although scientists have been able to sequence the genomes of many organisms, they still lack a context for associating the proteins encoded in genes with specific biological processes. To better understand the genetics underlying plant physiology and ecology—...
Washington, D.C.--On March 18, 2011, the MESSENGER spacecraft entered orbit around Mercury to become that planet’s first orbiter. The spacecraft’s instruments are making a complete reconnaissance of the planet’s geochemistry, geophysics, geologic history, atmosphere, magnetosphere, and plasma...
Washington, D.C.—Glasses differ from crystals. Crystals are organized in repeating patterns that extend in every direction. Glasses lack this strict organization, but do sometimes demonstrate order among neighboring atoms. New research from Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory...
The Summer 2011 edition of the Carnegie Science newsletter is now available in tablet-friendly format.
Washington, D.C.—Jewelers abhor diamond impurities, but they are a bonanza for scientists. Safely encased in the super-hard diamond, impurities are unaltered, ancient minerals that can tell the story of Earth’s distant past. Researchers analyzed data from the literature of over 4,000 of these...
Pasadena, CA— Water really is everywhere. A team of astronomers have found the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe—discovered in the central regions of a distant quasar. Quasars contain massive black holes that are steadily consuming a...
Palo Alto, CA—Decisions by farmers to plant on productive land with little snow enhances the potential for reforestation to counteract global warming, concludes new research from Carnegie’s Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira. Previous research has led scientists and politicians to...
Washington, D.C.—Geological history has periodically featured giant lava eruptions that coat large swaths of land or ocean floor with basaltic lava, which hardens into rock formations called flood basalt. New research from Matthew Jackson and Richard Carlson proposes that the...
Baltimore, MD — New research from a team including several Carnegie scientists demonstrates that a specific small segment of RNA could play a key role in the growth of a type of malignant childhood eye tumor called retinoblastoma. The tumor is associated with mutations of a...
Washington, D.C.—Meteorites hold a record of the chemicals that existed in the early Solar System and that may have been a crucial source of the organic compounds that gave rise to life on Earth. Since the 1960s, scientists have been trying to find proof that nucleobases, the...
Pasadena, CA— Type Ia supernovae are violent stellar explosions whose brightness is used to determine distances in the universe. Observing these objects to billions of light years away has led to the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, the foundation for the notion...
Washington, DC— Earth’s Moon could be younger than previously thought, according to new research from a team that includes Carnegie’s Richard Carlson and former-Carnegie fellow Maud Boyet. Their work will be published online in Nature on August 17.
The...
Palo Alto, CA—Plant biologists have been working for years to nail down the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell’s nucleus. New research from Carnegie scientists Tae-...
Pasadena, CA— A team of scientists, led by Michael Rauch from the Carnegie Observatories, has discovered a distant galaxy that may help elucidate two fundamental questions of galaxy formation: How galaxies take in matter and how they give off energetic radiation. Their work will...
Baltimore, MD— The human genome shares several peculiarities with the DNA of just about every other plant and animal. Our genetic blueprint contains numerous entities known as transposons, or “jumping genes,” which have the ability to move from place to place on the chromosomes...
Washington, D.C.—Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory’s newest staff member, Timothy Strobel, will be given the prestigious Jamieson Award on September 26, 2011, from the International Association for the Advancement of High Pressure Science and Technology in Mumbai, India. The Jamieson Award is...
Washington, D.C.—Scientists have speculated for some time that the Earth’s carbon cycle extends deep into the planet’s interior, but until now there has been no direct evidence. The mantle–Earth’s thickest layer –is largely inaccessible. A team of researchers analyzed diamonds...
Washington, D.C. — A planet with two suns may be a familiar sight to fans of the Star Wars film series, but not, until now, to scientists. A team of researchers, including Carnegie’s Alan Boss, has discovered a planet that orbits around a pair of stars. Their remarkable...
Washington, D.C.—Only six months into its Mercury orbit, the tiny MESSENGER spacecraft has shown scientists that Mercury doesn’t conform to theory. Its surface material composition differs in important ways from both those of the other terrestrial planets and expectations prior to the MESSENGER...
WASHINGTON, D.C.– The world's largest celebration of science and engineering, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, will return to Washington, D.C., April 27-29, 2012. For the second year, the Carnegie Institution for Science will participate with hands-on experiments. At Carnegie's booth...
Baltimore, MD—Staff associate Christoph Lepper, at Carnegie’s Department of Embryology, is one of 10 recipients of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Awards. This is the first year of the awards. Lepper will receive a prize of $250,000 per year for five years to carry out his creative...
Washington, D.C. — Carbon is the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe and takes on a wide variety of forms, called allotropes, including diamond and graphite. Scientists at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory are part of a team that has discovered a new form of carbon,...
Washington, D.C. — It is difficult to measure accurately each nation’s contribution of carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon is extracted out of the ground as coal, gas, and oil, and these fuels are often exported to other countries where they are burned to generate...
Washington, DC — Solar radiation management is a class of theoretical concepts for manipulating the climate in order to reduce the risks of global warming caused by greenhouse gasses. But its potential effectiveness and risks are uncertain, and it is unclear whether tests could...
What’s up with the Moon? Carnegie scientists have made some surprising discoveries that are revamping what we thought we knew about our closest celestial neighbor. Find out about that and what diamonds have uncovered about the evolution of Earth. You’ll also learn about a microRNA that could be...
Pasadena, CA-Join a discussion with leading astronomers about how one of the world’s largest telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope, will help solve some of the most vexing problems in astronomy today—from the nature of dark energy and dark matter to finding signatures of life on other planets...
Palo Alto, CA—U.S. scientists have developed a new, integrated, ten-year science plan to better understand the details of Earth’s carbon cycle and people’s role in it. Understanding the carbon cycle is central for mitigating climate change and developing a sustainable future. The plan builds on...
Baltimore, MD—Carnegie’s educational outreach program, BioEYES, has joined forces with General Motors (GM), and Earth Force to take Walter P. Carter Elementary/Middle School students on a knee-deep watershed lesson on December 1, 2011. The group will monitor water quality, sample aquatic insects...
Palo Alto, CA--The four largest nonprofit plant science research institutions in the U.S. have joined forces to form the Association of Independent Plant Research Institutes (AIPI) in an effort to target plant science research to meet the profound challenges facing society in a more coordinated...
Washington, D.C. — The composition of the Earth’s core remains a mystery. Scientists know that the liquid outer core consists mainly of iron, but it is believed that small amounts of some other elements are present as well. Oxygen is the most abundant element in the planet, so...
Baltimore, MD — Scientists have long held theories about the importance of proteins called B-type lamins in the process of embryonic stem cells replicating and differentiating into different varieties of cells. New research from a team led by Carnegie’s Yixian Zheng indicates...
Washington, D.C. — NASA’s Kepler Mission has discovered the first super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a star similar to the Sun. A team of researchers, including Carnegie’s Alan Boss, has discovered what could be a large, rocky planet with a surface temperature of...
Palo Alto, CA — Food prices are soaring at the same time as the Earth’s population is nearing 9 billion. As a result the need for increased crop yields is extremely important. New research led by Carnegie’s Wolf Frommer into the system by which sugars are moved throughout a...
Stanford, CA— Over the past 10 years, the death of forest trees due to drought and increased temperatures has been documented on all continents except Antarctica. This can in turn drive global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by trees...
Pasadena, CA— A team of scientists, including Carnegie’s Mansi M. Kasliwal, has observed the early stages of a Type Ia supernova that is only 21 million light years away from Earth--the closest of its kind discovered in 25 years. The Palomar Transient Factory team’s detection of...
Washington, D.C.—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...
Stanford, CA— 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...
Washington, D.C. — Coral reefs are extremely diverse ecosystems that support enormous biodiversity. But they are at risk. Carbon dioxide emissions are acidifying the ocean, threatening reefs and other marine organisms. New research led by Carnegie’s Kenneth Schneider analyzed...
Carnegie Institution for Science president Richard A. Meserve was elected a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was elected in the section covering the fields of radiation safety, energy development, and environmental protection. The Russian Academy has approximately 250...
Washington, D.C. — Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian geologic period, there was a mass extinction so severe that it remains the most traumatic known species die-off in Earth’s history. Although the cause of this event is a mystery, it has been speculated...
Washington, D.C.—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...
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),...
Washington, D.C. — 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...
Former staff member Roy Britten died January 21 at the age of 92. He joined DTM in 1951 as a member of the biophysics group. In 1971 he began his association with Caltech as a research associate
in molecular biology.Read the Terrestrial Magnetism story...
Washington, D.C.— 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...
Stanford, CA— Plant's 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...
Washington, D.C.—The Federation of American Scientists presented Richard A. Meserve, the Carnegie Institution president, with the inaugural 2011 Richard L. Garwin Award on February 8, for “his distinguished service and...
Washington, D.C.—By combining airborne laser technology, satellite mapping, and ground-based plot surveys, a team of researchers has produced the first large-scale, high-resolution estimates of carbon stocks in remote and fragile Madagascar. The group has shown that it is possible to map carbon...
Pasadena, CA— Eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars in our Milky Way galaxy, unexpectedly increased in brightness in the 19th century. For ten years in the mid-1800s it was the second-brightest star in the sky. (Now it is not even in the top 100.) The increase in luminosity...
Washington, D.C.— Could replacing coal-fired electricity plants with generators fueled by natural gas bring global warming to a halt in this century? What about rapid construction of massive numbers of solar or wind farms, hydroelectric dams, or nuclear reactors—or the invention...
Stanford, CA— Along with photosynthesis, the plant cell wall is one of the features that most set plants apart from animals. A structural molecule called cellulose is necessary for the manufacture of these walls. Cellulose is synthesized in a semi-crystalline state that is...
Washington, D.C. — Superconductivity is a rare physical state in which matter is able to conduct electricity—maintain a flow of electrons—without any resistance. This phenomenon can only be found in certain materials at low temperatures, or can be induced under chemical and high...
Stanford, CA—The major difference between plant and animal cells is the photosynthetic process, which converts light energy into chemical energy. When light isn’t available, energy is generated by breaking down carbohydrates and sugars, just as it is in animal and some bacterial...
Washington, D.C.— Seawater circulation pumps hydrogen and boron into the oceanic plates that make up the seafloor, and some of this seawater remains trapped as the plates descend into the mantle at areas called subduction zones. By analyzing samples of submarine volcanic glass...
Washington, D.C. — The Carnegie Institution for Science today announced that the complete archive of the Carnegie Year Book--the annual report of scientific research, published continuously since 1902--has been digitized and is now available online.
The...
Washington, D.C. — Plant science is key to addressing the major challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century, according to Carnegie’s David Ehrhardt and Wolf Frommer. In a Perspective published in The Plant Cell, the two researchers argue that the development of new...
Pasadena, CA--A team of astronomers has discovered the most distant cluster of red galaxies ever observed using FourStar, a new and powerful near-infrared camera on the 6.5m Magellan Baade Telescope. The galaxy cluster is located 10.5 billion light years away in the direction of...
Washington, D.C.—The Carnegie Institution for Science received the highest rating for sound fiscal management—four stars—from Charity Navigator for the eleventh consecutive year. Only eight organizations out of 5,500 have received the highest rating this long. The Carnegie Institution for...
Washington, D.C.—On March 17, the tiny MESSENGER spacecraft completed its primary mission to orbit and observe the planet Mercury for one Earth-year. The bounty of surprises from the mission has completely altered our understanding of the solar system’s innermost planet. As reported in one of...
Washington, D.C. — Scientists have long speculated about why there is a large change in the strength of rocks that lie at the boundary between two layers immediately under Earth’s crust: the lithosphere and underlying asthenosphere. Understanding this boundary is central to our...
Pasadena, CA--Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for what will be the world’s largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade. The telescope will be located at the Carnegie Institution’s Las Campanas...
On Friday, March 23, the first blast (Big Bang Event) occurred at Las Campanas Peak in Chile, at high noon US Eastern Daylight Time. It marked the beginning of mountain leveling and site preparation for the Giant Magellan Telescope.
The Giant Magellan Telescope will be one of the...
Washington, D.C.—Carnegie staff scientist Greg Asner has been selected as one of 22 experts to serve the U.S. government as part of the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) through the Senior ECPA Fellows Program. The program will send 22 experts from the academic, non-profit,...
Stanford, CA — The Plant Metabolic Network (http://www.plantcyc.org/), which is based at Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology, has launched four new online databases that offer an unprecedented view of the biochemical pathways controlling the metabolism...
Pasadena, CA – The board of directors of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) has informed the National Science Foundation (NSF) that they will not participate in an upcoming funding opportunity. The partners in the project feel that they are making such rapid progress that they have...
Find out the latest about potentially habitable planets around other stars. Learn about a new type of carbon that could give diamonds a run for their money. Discover what jumping genes, some 50% of the human genome, are really up to; how a molecular pump may be key to feeding the growing...
Washington, D.C. — How hydrogen--the most abundant element in the cosmos--responds to extremes of pressure and temperature is one of the major challenges in modern physical science. Moreover, knowledge gleaned from experiments using hydrogen as a testing ground on the nature of...
Washington, D.C.—The American Society for Plant Biology (ASPB) awarded Wolf B. Frommer, director of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology, the Lawrence Bogorad Award for Excellence in Plant Biology Research for “his major contributions in the development of fundamental tools and technologies...
Washington, D.C.— Carnegie Institution for Science president Richard A. Meserve has been elected president of the Harvard Board of Overseers for 2012-2013. The Overseers provide advice and approvals of important actions about educational policies and practices. Members are elected by Harvard and...
Pasadena, CA—The Big Bang produced lots of hydrogen and helium and a smidgen of lithium. All heavier elements found on the periodic table have been produced by stars over the last 13.7 billion years. Astronomers analyze starlight to determine the chemical makeup of stars, the origin of the...
Washington, D.C—Geochemist Richard Carlson of Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He is among 84 new members and 21 foreign associates of one the most prestigious...
Baltimore, MD — Insect glands are responsible for producing a host of secretions that allow bees to sting and ants to lay down trails to and from their nests. New research from Carnegie scientists focuses on secretions from glands in the reproductive tract that help sperm...
Pasadena, CA—Type Ia supernovae are important stellar phenomena, used to measure the expansion of the universe. But astronomers know embarrassingly little about the stars they come from and how the explosions happen. New research from a team led by Harvard University and...
Washington, D.C.— In the search for Earth-like planets, it is helpful to look for clues and patterns that can help scientist narrow down the types of systems where potentially habitable planets are likely to be discovered. New research from a team including Carnegie’s Alan Boss...
Washington, D.C. Carnegie’s Larry Nittler of Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism has been appointed deputy principal investigator of the MESSENGER mission to Mercury. Principal...
Nuclear Energy Institute FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:202.739.8000
For Release:May 22, 2012
Richard Meserve Receives Nuclear Energy Industry's Leadership Award
CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Carnegie Institution President Richard Meserve, respected as one of the world...
Washington, DC — Molecules containing large chains of carbon and hydrogen--the building blocks of all life on Earth--have been the targets of missions to Mars from Viking to the present day. While these molecules have previously been found in meteorites from Mars, scientists...
Washington, D.C. — One idea for fighting global warming is to increase the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere, scattering incoming solar energy away from the Earth’s surface. But scientists theorize that this solar geoengineering could have a side effect of whitening the sky...
ASP Press Release
Astronomical Society of the Pacific Honors Dr. Sandra Moore Faber with Prestigious Bruce Gold Medal Award
May 30, 2012
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP), one of the oldest and most respected astronomy societies in...
Stanford, CA—The scientific community needs to make a 10-year, $100 billion investment in food and energy security, says Carnegie’s Wolf Frommer and Tom Brutnell of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in an opinion piece published in the June issue of...
Washington, D.C.—Until now, Earth was the only planet known to have vast reservoirs of water in its interior. Scientists analyzed the water content of two Martian meteorites originating from inside the Red Planet. They found that the amount of water in places of the Martian mantle is vastly...
Washington, D.C. — Mineral evolution posits that Earth’s near-surface mineral diversity gradually increased through an array of chemical and biological processes. A dozen different species in interstellar dust particles that formed the solar system have evolved to more than 4500...
Read the summer CarnegieScience in tablet-friendly format.
Washington, D.C.—Although there have been about 800 extra-solar planets discovered so far in our galaxy, the precise masses of the majority of them are still unknown, as the most-common planet-finding technique provides only a general idea of an object’s mass. Previously, the...
Baltimore, MD — In mammals, most lipids (such as fatty acids and cholesterol) are absorbed into the body via the small intestine. The complexity of the cells and fluids that inhabit this organ make it very difficult to study in a laboratory setting. New research from Carnegie’s...
Washington, D.C.— When evaluating the historic contributions made by different countries to the greenhouse gasses found in Earth’s atmosphere, calculations generally go back no further than the year 1840. New research from Carnegie’s Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira shows that...
Washington, DC —Scientists have long believed that comets and, or a type of very primitive meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites were the sources of early Earth's volatile elements—which include hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon—and possibly organic material, too. Understanding...
Stanford, CA —Light is not only the source of a plant’s energy, but also an environmental signal that instructs the growth behavior of plants. As a result, a plant’s sensitivity to light is of great interest to scientists and their research on this issue could help improve crop...
Washington, D.C. — In order to understand Earth's earliest history--its formation from Solar System material into the present-day layering of metal core and mantle, and crust--scientists look to meteorites. New research from a team including Carnegie's Doug Rumble and Liping Qin...
Washington, D.C.— Comets and asteroids preserve the building blocks of our Solar System and should help explain its origin. But there are unsolved puzzles. For example, how did icy comets obtain particles that formed at high temperatures, and how did these refractory particles acquire rims with...
Washington, D.C.—Using new, highly efficient techniques, Carnegie and Colombian scientists have developed accurate high-resolution maps of the carbon stocks locked in tropical vegetation for 40% of the Colombian Amazon (165,000 square kilometers/64,000 square miles), an area about four times the...
Washington, D.C. — For decades it has been thought that a shock wave from a supernova explosion triggered the formation of our Solar System. According to this theory, the shock wave also injected material from the exploding star into a cloud of dust and gas, and the newly...
Washington, D.C.—Type Ia supernovae are violent stellar explosions. Observations of their brightness are used to determine distances in the universe and have shown scientists that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. But there is still too little known about the...
Washington, D.C. – For years, scientists have debated how big a role elephants play in toppling trees in South African savannas. Tree loss is a natural process, but it is increasing in some regions, with cascading effects on the habitat for many other species. Using high resolution 3-D mapping,...
Baltimore, MD — The study of muscular system protein myostatin has been of great interest to researchers as a potential therapeutic target for people with muscular disorders. Although much is known about how myostatin affects muscle growth, there has been disagreement about what...
Washington, D.C. — A team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Lin Wang has observed a new form of very hard carbon clusters, which are unusual in their mix of crystalline and disordered structure. The material is capable of indenting diamond. This finding has potential applications...
Washington, D.C.—Carnegie scientists are the first to discover the conditions under which nickel oxide can turn into an electricity-conducting metal. Nickel oxide is one of the first compounds to be studied for its electronic properties, but until now scientists have not been able to induce a...
Baltimore, MD—Director Emeritus Donald Brown, of Carnegie’s Department of Embryology, receives the prestigious 2012 Lasker-Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science “For exceptional leadership and citizenship in biomedical science–exemplified by fundamental discoveries concerning the...
Washington, D.C.— There is enough energy available in winds to meet all of the world’s demand. Airbourne wind turbines that convert steadier and faster high-altitude winds into energy could generate even more power than ground- and ocean-based units. New research from Carnegie’s...
Washington, D.C.— Over the past two decades, extensive forest death triggered by hot and dry climatic conditions has been documented on every continent except Antarctica. Forest mortality due to drought and heat stress is expected to increase due to climate change. Although...
Baltimore, MD —You may think you have dinner all to yourself, but you’re actually sharing it with a vast community of microbes waiting within your digestive tract. A new study from a team including Carnegie’s Steve Farber and Juliana Carten reveals that some gut microbes...
Senior trustee and retired Goddard Space Flight Center astronomer Jaylee Mead died September 14 at the age of 83 from congestive heart failure. Mead joined the Carnegie board in 1999 and she and her husband Gilbert, a geophysicist, were members of the Hubble Society. In addition to her many...
Pasadena, CA— With the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Daniel Kelson, have spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light from the young galaxy...
Watch the Carnegie Airborne Observatory in action mapping the biomass and biodiversity in the Amazon.
Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers, led by Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories, have used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make one of the most accurate and precise measurement yet of the Hubble...
Washington, D.C.—The Carnegie Institution for Science and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) have been granted United States Patent 8,283,329, entitled, “Genetic inhibition of double-stranded RNA.” The patent, issued on October 9, 2012, is broadly directed to the use of RNA...
Washington, D.C.— Solar radiation management is a type of geoengineering that would manipulate the climate in order to reduce the impact of global warming caused by greenhouse gasses. Ideas include increasing the amount of aerosols in the stratosphere, which could scatter...
Washington, D.C.--Scientists with the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization have completed the most challenging large astronomical mirror ever made. The mirror will be part of the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will explore planets around other stars and the formation of stars,...
Baltimore, MD— The ability of embryonic stem cells to differentiate into different types of cells with different functions is regulated and maintained by a complex series of chemical interactions, which are not well understood. Learning more about this process could prove useful...
Washington, DC—The Carnegie Institution announced today that it is a grant recipient of the Grand Challenges Explorations initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Wolf B. Frommer, director of Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology, jointly with Bing Yang from Iowa State...
Link for image and caption http://carnegiescience.edu/prcohenelectrotcpic101612
Washington, D.C.--Researchers at the Carnegie Institution have discovered a new efficient way to pump heat using crystals. The...
Washington, D.C.—Astronomers have discovered a new super-Earth in the habitable zone, where liquid water and a stable atmosphere could reside, around the nearby star HD 40307. It is one of three new super-Earths found around the star that has three other low-mass planets orbiting it. See video...
Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Daniel Kelson have set a new distance record for finding the farthest galaxy yet seen in the universe. By combining the power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and one of nature's own natural "zoom...
Washington, DC — A team of scientists, including Carnegie's Conel Alexander and Jianhua Wang, studied the hydrogen in water from the Martian interior and found that Mars formed from similar building blocks to that of Earth, but that there were differences in the later evolution...
Washington, D.C.— The mantles of Earth and other rocky planets are rich in magnesium and oxygen. Due to its simplicity, the mineral magnesium oxide is a good model for studying the nature of planetary interiors. New work from a team led by Carnegie’s Stewart McWilliams studied...
Washington, D.C. — Oceanic crust covers two-thirds of the Earth’s solid surface, but scientists still don’t entirely understand the process by which it is made. Analysis of more than 600 samples of oceanic crust by a team including Carnegie’s Frances Jenner reveals a systemic...
Stanford, CA — Plants grow upward from a tip of undifferentiated tissue called the shoot apical meristem. As the tip extends, stem cells at the center of the meristem divide and increase in numbers. But the cells on the periphery differentiate to form plant organs, such as...
San Francisco, CA —Researchers from the Carnegie Institution are rolling out results from the new Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System, or AToMS, for the first time at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meetings in San Francisco. The groundbreaking technology and its scientific observations are...
Washington, D.C.—The Carnegie Institution for Science received the highest rating for sound fiscal management and commitment to accountability and transparency—four stars—from Charity Navigator for the twelfth consecutive year. Charity Navigator is America's largest charity evaluator. Only five...
The Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) is a revolutionary advancement in remote sensing and 3-D analysis of ecosystem composition, chemistry, and physiology.
Clathrate Snowflake -- Image credit: Timothy Strobel, Carnegie Institution for Science, Geophysical Laboratory
This image was selected as our holiday card for 2012. The snowflake is based on a new structure of “filled” ice discovered recently at the Geophysical...
Washington, D.C. — When materials are stressed, they eventually change shape. Initially these changes are elastic, and reverse when the stress is relieved. When the material’s strength is exceeded, the changes become permanent. This could result in the material breaking or...
Washington, D.C.— An international team of scientists, including Carnegie’s Paul Butler, has discovered that Tau Ceti, one of the closest and most Sun-like stars, may have five planets. Their work is published by Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available...
Washington, D.C.—After extensive analyses by a team of scientists led by Carl Agee at the University of New Mexico, researchers have identified a new class of Martian meteorite that likely originated from Mars’s crust. It is also the only meteoritic sample dated to 2.1 billion years ago, the...
Washington, D.C.— In 2004 a very popular study aimed to address climate change by deploying wedges of different existing energy technologies or approaches. According to the study by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, each wedge would avoid one billion tons of carbon (1 GtC)...
Washington, D.C.—Richard A. Meserve, the president of the Carnegie Institution, has been invited to be an “international adviser” to the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Authority (JNRA). As a result of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, the Japanese government established the JNRA in order to provide...
Washington, D.C.— Researchers still have much to learn about the volcanism that shaped our planet’s early history. New evidence from a team led by Carnegie’s Frances Jenner demonstrates that some of the tectonic processes driving volcanic activity, such as those taking place...
Washington, D.C. —Until now it has not been clear how salt, a scourge to agriculture, halts the growth of the plant-root system. A team of researchers, led by the Carnegie Institution’s José Dinneny and Lina Duan, found that not all...
The American Physical Society's Historic Sites Committee has selected the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism a historic site for the pioneering research conducted by Vera Rubin and Kent Ford on dark matter. The duo made measurements of galactic rotations, which showed that galaxies do not...
Pasadena, CA—Type II supernovae are formed when massive stars collapse, initiating giant explosions. It is thought that stars emit a burst of mass as a precursor to the supernova explosion. If this process were better understood, it could be used to predict and study...
Washington, DC—A team of scientists, led by researchers at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, has determined that the recent widespread die-off of Colorado trembling aspen trees is a direct result of decreased precipitation exacerbated by high summer temperatures. The die-off, triggered by...
Washington, D.C.—Solar geoengineering is a proposed approach to reduce the effects of climate change due to greenhouse gasses by deflecting some of the sun’s incoming radiation. This type of proposed solution carries with it a number of uncertainties, however, including...
Washington, D.C.—Solar geoengineering is a proposed approach to reduce the effects of climate change due to greenhouse gasses by deflecting some of the sun’s incoming radiation. This type of proposed solution carries with it a number of uncertainties, however, including...
Washington, D.C.— Mineral evolution is a new way to look at our planet’s history. It’s the study of the increasing diversity and characteristics of Earth’s near-surface minerals, from the dozen that arrived on interstellar dust particles when the Solar System was formed to the...
Washington, D.C.—New theoretical modeling by Carnegie’s Alan Boss provides clues to how the gas giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter and Saturn—might have formed and evolved. His work was published recently by The Astrophysical Journal.
New stars...
Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Ian Thompson have managed to improve the measurement of the distance to our nearest neighbor galaxy and, in the process, refine an astronomical calculation that helps measure the expansion of the universe. Their work is...
Pasadena, CA—For only the second time in history, a team of scientists--including Carnegie's Michele Fumagalli--have discovered an extremely rare triple quasar system. Their work is published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It is available online...
Pasadena, CA — Using information gathered from several telescopes, a team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Eric Murphy, searched the sky for very rarely seen dusty starburst galaxies, formed soon after the Big Bang. These galaxies are characterized by an unusually high rate...
Valdivia, Chile, and Washington, D.C.—Cancer cells break down sugars and produce the metabolic acid lactate at a much higher rate than normal cells. This phenomenon provides a telltale sign that cancer is present, via diagnostics such as PET scans, and possibly offers an avenue...
Washington, D.C.— It has long been believed that male lions are dependent on females when it comes to hunting. But new evidence suggests that male lions are, in fact, very successful hunters in their own right. A new report from a team including Carnegie's Scott Loarie and Greg...
Pasadena, CA— Supernovae were always thought to occur in two main varieties. But a team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Wendy Freedman, Mark Phillips and Eric Persson is reporting the discovery of a new type of supernova called Type Iax. This research has been accepted for...
Washington, D.C.—A research team, led by Carnegie’s Anna Michalak, has determined that the 2011 record-breaking algal bloom in Lake Erie was triggered by long-term agricultural practices coupled with extreme precipitation, followed by weak lake circulation and warm temperatures. The team also...
Washington, D.C.— Carnegie scientists have found that the plant species making up an ecosystem are better predictors of ecosystem chemistry than environmental conditions such as terrain, geology, or altitude. This is the first study using a new, high-resolution airborne, chemical-detecting...
Washington, D.C.— A team of researchers has made a major breakthrough in measuring the structure of nanomaterials under extremely high pressures. For the first time, they developed a way to get around the severe distortions of high-energy X-ray beams that are used to image the structure of a...
Baltimore, MD--Recent research shows that natural experiences in childhood boost creativity, stimulate learning, and improve behavior and health. Carnegie’s BioEYES educational program, in partnership with General Motors (GM), is capitalizing on this by...
Baltimore, MD— Eggs take a long time to produce in the ovary, and thus are one of a body’s precious resources. It has been theorized that the body has mechanisms to help the ovary ensure that ovulated eggs enter the reproductive tract at the right time in order to maximize the...
Washington, D.C.—A team of scientists, including Carnegie’s Alan Boss, has discovered two Earth-like planets in the habitable orbit of a Sun-like star. Their work is published in Science Express.
Using observations gathered by NASA’s Kepler Mission, the...
Pasadena, CA— Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of a blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most-distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. But its emission spectrum appears highly...
Washington, D.C.— Scientists have long believed that lava erupted from certain oceanic volcanoes contains materials from the early Earth’s crust. But decisive evidence for this phenomenon has proven elusive. New research from a team including Carnegie’s Erik Hauri demonstrates...
Washington, D.C.—Forecasting volcanic eruptions with success is heavily dependent on recognizing well-established patterns of pre-eruption unrest in the monitoring data. But in order to develop better monitoring procedures, it is also crucial to understand volcanic eruptions...
Baltimore, MD—Mammalian females ovulate periodically over their reproductive lifetimes, placing significant demands on their ovaries for egg production. Whether mammals generate new eggs in adulthood using stem cells has been a source of scientific controversy. If true, these “...
Washington, D.C.—Carnegie staff scientist Greg Asner has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries elected “in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” The total number of...
Stanford, CA— An international team of 12 leading plant biologists, including Carnegie’s Wolf Frommer, say their discoveries could have profound implications for increasing the supply of food and energy for our rapidly growing global population. All of their work focuses on the...
Washington, D.C.— Lyman Thomas Aldrich, 95, who worked as a geophysicist and geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) for 34 years, including a stint as its acting director, died Wednesday, May 1, at a retirement community in...
Washington, D.C.— Water is perhaps the most important molecule in our solar system. Figuring out where it came from and how it was distributed within and among the planets can help scientists understand how planets formed and evolved. New research from a team including Carnegie’...
Washington, D.C.—President of the Carnegie Institution, Richard A. Meserve, was awarded the 2013 Henry DeWolf Smyth Nuclear Statesman Award by the American Nuclear Society (ANS) and the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C., on May 14, 2013.
Vice-president Donald Hoffman of...
Washington, D.C.--Christopher Field, the founding director of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, has been elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers. Field, who received his bachelors in biology from Harvard in 1975, has been a pioneer in developing new approaches to understand the large-...
Washington, D.C.—Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. The way it responds under extreme pressures and temperatures is crucial to our understanding of matter and the nature of hydrogen-rich planets.
New work from Carnegie scientists using intense...
Washington, D.C.—The Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE) was awarded a grant to run two special career exploration programs for students who attend public schools in the District of Columbia. The program is called SciLife™-DC. On Monday, June 17 at 1:00 PM, CASE will host the...
Images of the Carnegie Rupes:
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Washington, D.C.—Using revolutionary new techniques, a team led by Carnegie’s Malcolm Guthrie has made a striking discovery about how ice behaves under pressure, changing ideas that date back almost 50 years. Their findings could alter our understanding of how the water molecule...
Washington, D.C.—A team of researchers has discovered evidence that an extrasolar planet may be forming quite far from its star—about twice the distance Pluto is from our Sun. The planet lies inside a dusty, gaseous disk around a small red dwarf TW Hydrae, which is only about 55% of the mass of...
Stanford, CA—Cereals are grasses that produce grains, the bulk of our food supply. Carnegie’s Plant Biology Department is releasing genome-wide metabolic complements of several cereals including rice, barley, sorghum, and millet. Along with corn, whose metabolic complement was...
Washington, D.C.—A team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Paul Butler, has combined new observations with existing data to reveal a solar system packed full of planets. The star Gliese 667C is orbited by between five and seven planets, the maximum number that could fit in...
Washington, D.C.—To prevent coral reefs around the world from dying off, deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are required, says a new study from Carnegie’s Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira. They find that all existing coral reefs will be engulfed in inhospitable ocean...
Washington, D.C.—Superconductivity is a rare physical state in which matter is able to conduct electricity—maintain a flow of electrons—without any resistance. This phenomenon can only be found in certain materials under specific low-temperature and high-pressure conditions....
Stanford, CA—Transport proteins are responsible for moving materials such as nutrients and metabolic products through a cell’s outer membrane, which seals and protects all living cells, to the cell’s interior. These transported molecules include sugars, which can be used to fuel...
Washington, D.C.--Christopher Field, the founding director of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology has been awarded one of Germany’s most prestigious prizes, the Max Planck Research Prize with Markus Reichstein “because they have significantly increased our knowledge of how life on Earth...
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Baltimore, MD—Proper tissue function and regeneration is supported by stem cells, which reside in so-called niches. New work from Carnegie’s Yixian Zheng and Haiyang Chen identifies an important component for...
Washington, DC—A study published in the July 17, issue of the journal PLOS ONE found that more than 80% of tropical forests in Malaysian Borneo have been heavily impacted by logging.
The Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak were already thought to be global hotspots of forest loss...
Washington, D.C—Carnegie geochemist Richard Carlson has been awarded the prestigious Arthur L. Day Medal from the Geological Society of America (GSA) for “outstanding distinction in contributing to geologic knowledge through the application of physics and chemistry to the solution of geologic...
Watch the Carnegie Airborne Observatory make the world's highest resolution carbon map of a country (Panama) in less than one minute
Washington, DC—A team of researchers has for the first time mapped the above ground carbon...
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Washington, D.C.—Comets and meteorites contain clues to our solar system's earliest days. But some of the findings are puzzle pieces that don't seem to fit well together. A new set of theoretical models from...
Washington, D.C.— Hydrogen is deceptively simple. It has only a single electron per atom, but it powers the sun and forms the majority of the observed universe. As such, it is naturally exposed to the entire range of pressures and temperatures available in the whole cosmos. But...
Washington, DC—Researchers reviewed the likelihood of continued changes to the terrestrial climate, including an analysis of a collection of 27 climate models. If emissions of heat-trapping gases continue along the recent trajectory, 21st century mean annual global warming could exceed 3.6 °F (...
Washington, D.C—The key to understanding Earth’s evolution is to look at how heat is conducted in the deep lower mantle—a region some 400 to 1,800 miles (660 to 2,900 kilometers) below the surface. Researchers at the Carnegie Institution, with colleagues at the University of Illinois, have for...
Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers from three institutions has developed a new type of telescope camera that makes higher resolution images than ever before, the culmination of 20 years of effort. The team has been developing this technology at telescope observatories in...
Baltimore, MD--Cells in the body wear down over time and die. In many organs, like the small intestine, adult stem cells play a vital role in maintaining function by replacing old cells with new ones. Learning about the nature of tissue stem cells can help scientists understand...
Washington, D.C. --The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), a database of genetic and molecular biology data for the laboratory plant Arabidopsis thaliana, is one of the most widely used plant databases in the world. Some 60,000 scientists visit the site and view over 1,000,000 pages per...
Stanford, CA— Coral reefs are tremendously important for ocean biodiversity, as well as for the economic and aesthetic value they provide to their surrounding communities. Unfortunately they have been in great decline in recent years, much of it due to the effects of global...
Washington, D.C.— Postdoctoral fellow, Rubén Rellán-Álvarez at the Department of Plant Biology has been awarded the prestigious Marschner Young Scientist Award by the International Plant Nutrition Colloquium. The award was established for “outstanding Ph.D. students and early-career researchers...
Washington, D.C.—Hydrocarbons from the Earth make up the oil and gas that heat our homes and fuel our cars. The study of the various phases of molecules formed from carbon and hydrogen under high pressures and temperatures, like those found in the Earth's interior, helps...
Washington, D.C.— A great deal of research has focused on the amount of global warming resulting from increased greenhouse gas concentrations. But there has been relatively little study of the pace of the change following these increases. A new study by Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira...
September 30, 2013
A great deal of research has focused on the amount of global warming resulting from increased greenhouse gas concentrations. But there has been relatively little study of the pace of the change following these increases. A new study by Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira and...
October 8, 2013
A new planet-hunting survey has revealed planetary candidates with orbital periods as short as four hours and so close to their host stars that they are nearly skimming the stellar surface. If confirmed, these candidates would be among the closest planets to their stars...
Washington, D.C.— A new planet-hunting survey has revealed planetary candidates with orbital periods as short as four hours and so close to their host stars that they are nearly skimming the stellar surface. If confirmed, these candidates would be among the closest planets to...
Pasadena, CA—A team of researchers including Carnegie’s Mansi Kasliwal and John Mulchaey used a novel astronomical survey software system—the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF)—to link a new stripped-envelope supernova, named iPTF13bvn, to the star from which it...
October 24, 2013
Dr. Mildred Dresselhaus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics
Nanoscience research investigates the behavior of materials at the atomic level. It has led to a dramatic increase in our understanding about why these materials behave...
Washington, DC—For the first time, researchers have been able to map the true extent of gold mining in the biologically diverse region of Madre De Dios in the Peruvian Amazon. The team combined field surveys with airborne mapping and high-resolution satellite monitoring to show...
CarnegieScience On the Inside
Superconducting Surprise, p 3
Flying Tours with the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, p 2
No Stem Cells for...
November 7, 2013
Inside every plant cell, a cytoskeleton provides an interior scaffolding to direct construction of the cell’s walls, and thus the growth of the organism as a whole. Environmental and hormonal signals that modulate cell growth cause reorganization of this scaffolding...
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Stanford, CA—Inside every plant cell, a cytoskeleton provides an interior scaffolding to direct construction of the cell’s walls, and thus the growth of the organism as a whole. Environmental and hormonal...
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Washington, D.C.— Reconstructing the rise of life during the period of Earth’s history when it first evolved is challenging. Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks are not only rare, but also almost always altered...
Greg Asner: Ecology from the Air: TED talk
What are our forests really...
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Washington, D.C.— Around 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, there was a mass extinction so severe that it remains the most traumatic known species die-off in Earth’s history. Some...
Washington, D.C.— Life originated as a result of natural processes that exploited early Earth’s raw materials. Scientific models of life’s origins almost always look to minerals for such essential tasks as the synthesis of life’s molecular building blocks or the supply of...
Washington, D.C.— Government calculations of total U.S. methane emissions may underestimate the true values by 50 percent, a new study finds. The results are published the week of November 25 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
Holiday Leaves -- Image credit: Bi-Huei Hou, Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology
Washington, D.C.—The Carnegie Institution for Science received the highest rating for sound fiscal management and commitment to accountability and transparency—four stars—from Charity Navigator for the thirteenth consecutive year. Charity Navigator is America's largest charity evaluator. Only 2...
December 9, 2013
In researching neural pathways, it helps to establish an analogous relationship between a region of the human brain and the brains of more-easily studied animal species. New work from a team led by Carnegie's Marnie Halpern hones in on one particular region of the...
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Baltimore, MD—In researching neural pathways, it helps to establish an analogous relationship between a region of the human brain and the brains of more-easily studied animal species. New work from a team led...
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Baltimore, MD— One classical question in developmental biology is how different tissue types arise in the correct position of the developing embryo. While one signaling pathway that controls this process has...
Life originated as a result of natural processes that exploited early Earth's raw materials. Scientific models of life's origins almost always look to minerals for such essential tasks as the synthesis of life's molecular building blocks or the supply of metabolic energy. But this...
Pasadena, CA— Astronomers, including Carnegie’s Yuri Beletsky, took precise measurements of the closest pair of failed stars to the Sun, which suggest that the system harbors a third, planetary-mass object.The research is published as a letter to the editor in Astronomy & Astrophysics...
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Washington, D.C.— Forest conservation is an issue of major concern to communities large and small around the globe. But gathering the monitoring data needed to make the right decisions has proven extremely...
Washington, D.C.—Table salt, sodium chloride, is one of the first chemical compounds that schoolchildren learn. Standard chemistry textbooks say that sodium and chlorine have very different electronegativities and thus must form an ionic compound with a well-defined composition...
Washington, D.C.--Christopher Field, the founding director of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology and co-chair of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group 2, has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change, “for...
January 16, 2014
Dance on a Volcano: A Quarter Century of Experimental First Ascents
Dr. Donald B. Dingwell, Secretary General of the European Research Council, President of the European Geosciences Union, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Department of Earth and Environmental...
YouTube
Baltimore, MD— As all school-children learn, cells divide using a process called mitosis, which consists of a number of phases during which duplicate copies of the cell's DNA-containing chromosomes are...
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Baltimore, MD—Exposure to environmental endocrine disrupters, such as bisphenol A, which mimic estrogen, is associated with adverse health effects. Bisphenol A is commonly found in plastic bottles and plastic...
Stanford, CA—Carnegie’s Li-Quing Chen, recipient of a Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science, announced late last year, is honored with an editorial and minireview in New Phytologist this month.
The journal’s Tansley medal is awarded each year in...
Washington, D.C.—New research shows that a remarkable defect in synthetic diamond produced by chemical vapor deposition allows researchers to measure, witness, and potentially manipulate electrons in a manner that could lead to new “quantum technology” for information processing. The study is...
YouTube
Washington, D.C.— The pace of global warming over the last century has been about twice as rapid over land than over the oceans and will continue to be more dramatic going forward if emissions are not curbed...
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Stanford, CA— As every gardner knows, nitrogen is crucial for a plant’s growth. But nitrogen absorption is inefficient. This means that on the scale of food crops, adding significant levels of nitrogen to the...
Pasadena, CA–The international consortium of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project has passed two major reviews and is positioned to enter the construction phase. When completed, the 25-meter GMT will have more than six times the collecting area of the largest telescopes today and ten times...
February 20, 2014
Dr. Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institution for Science, Geophysical Laboratory
Washington, D.C.— In many ways, plants act as chemical factories, using energy from sunlight to produce carbon-based energy and taking nutrients from the soil in order to synthesize a wide variety of products. Carnegie scientists asked the question: How much does the portfolio...
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Stanford, CA— Evolution is based on diversity, and sexual reproduction is key to creating a diverse population that secures competitiveness in nature. Plants had to solve a problem: they needed to find ways to...
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Washington, D.C.—New global imaging and topographic data from MESSENGER* show that the innermost planet has contracted far more than previous estimates. The results are based on a global study of more than 5,900 geological...
Plants convert energy from sunlight into chemical energy during a process called photosynthesis. This energy is passed on to humans and animals that eat the plants, and thus photosynthesis is the primary source of energy for all life on Earth. But the photosynthetic activity of various regions...
March 25, 2014--The Kavli Foundation’s board of directors has announced the election of three new board members including Richard A. Meserve, president of the Carnegie Institution for Science, expanding the board from five to eight members.
“As head of the Carnegie...
Washington, D.C.—The Solar System has a new most-distant member, bringing its outer frontier into focus.
New work from Carnegie's Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory reports the discovery of a distant dwarf planet, called 2012 VP113, which was...
March 27, 2014
Dr. José R. Dinneny, Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology
We see plants everywhere in our daily lives, but half of the plant, the root system, is hidden from our eyes. Dr. Dinneny will discuss why studying roots is critical for our...
WASHINGTON, D.C.– The world's largest celebration of science and engineering, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, will return to Washington, D.C., April 25-27, 2014. For our third year, the Carnegie Institution for Science will participate with hands-on experiences and opportunities to...
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Stanford, CA—Floods and droughts are increasingly in the news, and climate experts say their frequency will only go up in the future. As such, it is crucial for scientists to learn more about how these extreme events affect...
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Stanford, CA— Photosynthesis provides fixed carbon and energy for nearly all life on Earth, yet many aspects of this fascinating process remain mysterious. For example, little is known about how it is...
April 22, 2014
Dr. Maria T. Zuber
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Washington, D.C.— Linda Elkins-Tanton, director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, is resigning her position at Carnegie, effective May 9, 2014. She has accepted a position as the director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University,...
Washington, D.C.— Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for the impending dangers of human-made climate change, policy decisions leading to substantial emissions reduction have been slow. New work from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira focuses on the intersection...
Pasadena, CA— Astronomer and instrumentation expert Stephen Shectman of the Carnegie Observatories has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Shectman investigates the large-scale structure of the distribution of galaxies; searches for ancient stars; develops novel and creative...
Pasadena, CA— New work from a team of scientists including Carnegie’s Josh Simon analyzed the chemical elements in the faintest known galaxy, called Segue 1, and determined that it is effectively a fossil galaxy left over from the early universe.
Astronomers hoping to...
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Stanford, CA—Plants spend their entire lifetime rooted to one spot. When faced with a bad situation, such as a swarm of hungry herbivores or a viral outbreak, they have no option to flee but instead must fight...
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Stanford, CA—All living cells are held together by membranes, which provide a barrier to the transport of nutrients. They are also the communication platform connecting the outside world to the cell’s interior...
Washington, D.C.—By unanimous vote of the Carnegie Board of Trustees, Dr. Matthew P. Scott has been appointed the 10th president of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Dr. Scott is Professor of Developmental Biology, Genetics, Bioengineering, and Biology at the Stanford University School of...
"Matt understood our Carnegie. He was excited about the potential of working with us. In parallel, we were thrilled with his ideas, which melded our current state of experience with projected innovative approaches for the future."
Deborah Rose, Secretary of the Carnegie Board of Trustees...
"Matt Scott transformed Stanford's bioscience research as an inspirational and effective leader of Stanford's interdisciplinary Bio-X Program. The result is a thriving and broad-based research program that brings together 100s of researchers from diverse disciplines focused on enhancing human...
“Matt Scott is a great choice to lead the Carnegie Institution for Science. As a world-class biologist and Chair of Stanford’s Bio-X initiative, Matt has a deep understanding of what leading-edge, interdisciplinary science requires.
He also has boundless curiosity about the world...
“Matt Scott will be a visionary leader of the Carnegie Institution at a time when so many extraordinary technological breakthroughs have opened up unprecedented opportunities in science.”
Lucy Shapiro, Director, Beckman Center for Molecular & Genetic Medicine
Stanford...
“Matt Scott will continue a tradition of strong leadership at the helm of the Carnegie—he is a highly accomplished developmental biologist who also has broad and deep interests in many other areas of discovery research including the environment, molecular evolution, and multiple disciplines...
“Matt Scott is the perfect choice to lead the Carnegie Institution for Science. A world-renowned geneticist, his wide-ranging discoveries have illuminated how the body takes shape during embryonic development and led to the development of new cancer therapies. He is unusual in the breadth of his...
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Pasadena, CA— The structures and star populations of massive galaxies appear to change as they age, but much about how these galaxies formed and evolved remains mysterious. Many of the oldest and most...
Pasadena, CA—Wolf-Rayet stars are very large and very hot. Astronomers have long wondered whether Wolf-Rayet stars are the progenitors of certain types of supernovae. New work from the Palomar Transient Factory team, including Carnegie’s Mansi Kasliwal, is homing in on the...
Washington, D.C.—Breaking research news from a team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Ho-kwang “Dave” Mao reveals that the composition of the Earth’s lower mantle may be significantly different than previously thought. These results are to be published by Science.
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Baltimore, MD— A woman’s supply of eggs is a precious commodity because only a few hundred mature eggs can be produced throughout her lifetime and each must be as free as possible from genetic damage. Part of egg production involves a winnowing of the egg supply during fetal...
Washington, D.C.— An international team of astronomers, including five Carnegie scientists, reports the discovery of two new planets orbiting a very old star that is near to our own Sun. One of these planets...
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Stanford, CA— A team of researchers studying a flowering plant has zeroed in on the way cells manage external signals about prevailing conditions, a capability that is essential for cells to survive in a...
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Stanford, CA—Soil is a microscopic maze of nooks and crannies that hosts a wide array of life. Plants explore this environment by developing a complex branched network of roots that tap into scarce resources...
Washington, D.C.-—The American Geophysical Union (AGU) announced on June 30 that Christopher Field will receive the Roger Revelle Medal. Field is director of Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology.
The medal is...
Washington, D.C.—The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Carnegie $10 million over four years for basic research that could lead to the discovery of new energy materials through its program to support Energy Frontier Research Centers. The Carnegie center, Energy Frontier Research in Extreme...
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Pasadena, CA—Something is amiss in the Universe. There appears to be an enormous deficit of ultraviolet light in the cosmic budget.
The vast reaches of empty space between galaxies are bridged by...
July 12, 2014
Eating meat contributes to climate change, due to greenhouse gasses emitted by livestock. New research finds that livestock emissions are on the rise and that beef cattle are responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than other types of animals. It is published by ...
Washington, DC—Eating meat contributes to climate change, due to greenhouse gasses emitted by livestock. New research finds that livestock emissions are on the rise and that beef cattle are responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than other types of animals. It is...
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Washington, D.C.—The planet’s soil releases about 60 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, which is far more than that released by burning fossil fuels. This happens through a process called...
Washington, D.C.—Nobel laureate and trustee emeritus Charles Townes is celebrating his 99th birthday on Monday, July 28.
Townes joined the Carnegie board in 1965, one year after he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov for the...
Scientists unveiled the first high-resolution map of the carbon stocks stored on land throughout the entire country of Perú. The mapping project is a joint effort among the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), led by Carnegie’s Greg Asner, the Ministry of Environment of Perú, and Wake Forest...
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Washington, D.C.— Molybdenum disulfide is a compound often used in dry lubricants and in petroleum refining. Its semiconducting ability and similarity to the carbon-based graphene makes molybdenum disulfide of...
Washington, D.C.—Astronomers have discovered an extremely cool object that could have a particularly diverse history—although it is now as cool as a planet, it may have spent much of its youth as hot as a star.
The current temperature of the object is 200 to 300 degrees...
Wendy Freedman, the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Carnegie Observatories and chair of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization has accepted a position as a University Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, departing Carnegie September 1, 2014. Associate...
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Stanford, CA—Everyone’s heard of the birds and the bees. But that old expression leaves out the flowers that are being fertilized. The fertilization process for flowering plants is particularly complex and...
As part of Carnegie’s public outreach efforts, the institution hosts various science-related lectures, events, and seminars at its administration building in Washington, D.C., and at the Carnegie campuses on the East and West Coasts. These events are all free and open to the public and...
Science so permeates our lives today that it is easy to take its discoveries and achievements for granted. Its march seems inevitable, almost automatic. But science is by...
The Carnegie Institution communications team issues press releases, manages digital and social content, and distributes periodical and special publications. Recent volumes of the institution's quarterly newsletter, annual year book, and other publications are also available on this site. The...
The Carnegie Institution publications office issues periodical and special publications, issues press releases, and manages web content. Recent issues of the institution's quarterly newsletter, the annual year book, and other recent publications are also available on this site. The publications...
CARNEGIE HISTORIES
For more information about Carnegie Institution for Science see our official histories:
Good Seeing : A Century of Science at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1902- 2002...
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Research by Carnegie scientists extends widely across life, Earth and planetary, and space sciences.
Most of our scientists are willing to respond to queries about their fields of research from the press and general public, provided...
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Carnegie News Letter Contains articles featuring the research of the scientists of the institution, as well as current programs and events. Published three times a year. | ...
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