News

The sun is again shining on SunsetWx, a sunrise and sunset forecasting tool devised by a trio of current and former Penn State students. The Weather Channel, one of the world’s foremost providers of weather information, has partnered with SunsetWx and will feature its exclusive forecasting methodology on two of the network’s popular shows, AMHQ and Weather Underground.

While most climate scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, implicitly define "pre-industrial" to be in the late 1800's, a true non-industrially influenced baseline is probably further in the past, according to an international team of researchers who are concerned because it affects the available carbon budget for meeting the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit agreed to in the Paris Conference of 2015.

Predicting the weather is a challenge, but predicting who will win the national WxChallenge isn’t nearly as hard. Penn State’s WxChallenge team continues to dominate the 20-week weather forecasting competition, recently earning its sixth straight top finish.

During the civil rights movement, activist groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) used geography and geospatial intelligence to identify protest sites and to plan civil rights protests. A new $373,000 National Science Foundation grant is letting researchers dig into those geospatial tactics to see what can be learned about patterns of racial inequality and how the SNCC collected and leveraged geospatial intelligence data to bolster its activist efforts.

Large, robust, lens-shaped microfossils from the approximately 3.4 billion-year-old Kromberg Formation of the Kaapvaal craton in eastern South Africa are not only among the oldest elaborate microorganisms known, but are also related to other intricate microfossils of the same age found in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, according to an international team of scientists.

The Penn State Center Pittsburgh will host a screening of the WPSU documentary “Managing Risk in a Changing Climate” and a panel discussion featuring climate experts and Pittsburgh stakeholders from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on July 13 at the Energy Innovation Center, located at 1435 Bedford Avenue, in Pittsburgh.

Shimin Liu, Joseph Kreutzberger Early Career Professor and assistant professor of energy and mineral engineering in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State, has been selected to receive one of the 2017 Freeport-McMoRan Career Development Grants from the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration.

The Human Health and the Environment seed grants for 2017 have been awarded to a pool of interdisciplinary researchers at Penn State. These seed grants were funded by eight separate Penn State research entities and institutes, which collectively contributed more than $500,000. “We had an exceptional pool of proposals from faculty across the university,” Tom Richard, director of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, said. “The projects address emerging contaminants well as legacy environmental problems that seriously impact human health.”

Squid-inspired proteins can act as programmable assemblers of 2D materials, like graphene oxide, to form hybrid materials with minute spacing between layers suitable for high-efficiency devices including flexible electronics, energy storage systems and mechanical actuators, according to an interdisciplinary team of Penn State researchers.

An investigational compound developed by Penn State researchers that targets and destroys cancer cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed has been approved for phase one clinical human trials by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).