Today’s integrated circuits are limited by power dissipation, heat, which limits the packing density of transistors on a computer chip.  Penn State is an integral part of The Center for Low Energy Systems Technology (LEAST), led by Notre Dame, which explores new concepts for the transistor to dramatically lower the power requirements for electronics. <<more>>

Meteorology Professor Anne Thompson and Research Associate Doug Martins are leading the Penn State team that's acting as ground control on NASA air pollution research. Read the full story here.

Professors Richard Alley and Jenni Evans offered their insight on climate change in a recent piece in the Harrisburg Patriot-News. The op-ed from Evans, interim director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, notes that "the existence of natural climate change does not remove the human finger print" from what is taking place. Read the full story here.

In an opinion piece in the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times, Penn State EESI Director Susan Brantley and Anna Meyendorff, a faculty member at the University of Michigan, discuss the science of natural gas drilling, concerns and economics. Read the full story here.

Penn State  joined the leading massive open online course (MOOC) platform, Coursera, making it possible for the University to provide courses on a vast scale and open higher education to hundreds of thousands more students than was previously possible.  <<FULL STORY>>

Social Sciences - Sustainability Science:  Karl Zimmerer, Professor of Geography - SELECTED ABSTRACT - Integrating the conservation of biodiversity by smallholder farmers with agricultural intensification is increasingly recognized as a leading priority of sustainability and food security amid global environmental and socioeconomic change.  <<Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences>>

Donald Voight, chief scientist at the WAIS Divide Camp, examines an ice core.  A team of U.S. ice-coring scientists and engineers in Antarctica, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), has recovered from the ice sheet a record of past climate and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that extends back 68,000 years.  <<STORY>>

Luis F. Ayala H. has been appointed to succeed Larry Grayson as the graduate program officer in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering (EME), effective February 1. <<STORY>>

Join the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in congratulating Stephen Weitzner on recieving the 2012 Astronaut Foundation Scholarship Award.  The Astronaut Scholarship is the largest monetary award given in the United States to undergraduate STEM students.  <<STORY>>

David Pollard's work is taking him back in time five million years, not only to learn about the past but also what could be coming in the future.

Pollard, a senior scientist in Penn State's Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, is developing computer programs that can model the behavior of ice sheets in the past, and from that gain insight into what upcoming generations could see. Read the full story here...

http://www.eesi.psu.edu/people/eesi-person-month/eesi-person-of-the-mont...

Michael T. Klein, the Dan Rich chair of energy at the University of Delaware, will be the featured speaker of the 2013 Peter H. Given Lectureship in Coal Science. He will deliver two lectures focused on his work in developing chemical models of complex reaction systems that assist with the upgrading and conversion of coal and biomass to liquid fuels. <<STORY>>

In research, "small" breakthroughs can have a big impacts, impacts that can save lives.  Jim Adaair and his team at Penn State are transforming the way we treat an detect cancer . . . <<YouTube Video>>

Caribou and reindeer are classified by scientists as the same species, with the domesticated deer dispersed across parts of Europe and Asia and the wild caribou found in North America and Greenland.  <<STORY>>

'Promised Land' doesn't begin to address the real questions raised by shale gas development.  In "Promised Land," the new movie set in rural Pennsylvania where a big company is looking to drill for natural gas, the main character played by Matt Damon acknowledges to a crowd gathered in a school gym that there are real environmental risks associated with Marcellus Shale drilling. <<STORY>>

Every year, wildfires burn through woods and meadows, trees and grass, scorching pines, firs and shrubs. At times, the blazes reach into residential areas as firefighters struggle to contain them, and researchers try to find better ways to respond.  <<STORY>>