For both Zuleima Karpyn and Luis Ayala, leaving their home country of Venezuela for a Penn State education seemed like a daunting task. After all, they never could have imagined that it would lead to advancing their education, developing their careers as faculty members or meeting each other, resulting in a marriage that's produced three children.
Human waste may one day be a valuable resource for astronauts on deep-space missions. Now, a Penn State research team has shown that it is possible to rapidly break down solid and liquid waste to grow food with a series of microbial reactors, while simultaneously minimizing pathogen growth.
The warming climate is expected to affect coastal regions worldwide as glaciers and ice sheets melt, raising sea level globally. For the first time, an international team has found evidence of how sea-level rise already is affecting high and low tides in both the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, two large estuaries of the eastern United States.
Being an elite student in an elite program at Penn State affords some elite opportunities. For Andrew Vislosky, a senior majoring in petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State, it meant being one of eight students worldwide granted an all-expenses-paid trip to the Oil & Money Conference recently held in London.
During a 2017 educational-based trip to Alaska that was focused on glacial systems, Courtney Rome began studying something that wasn't on the syllabus. Her curiosity resulted in an award-winning poster at the annual EMS Undergraduate Poster Exhibition.
Penn State's Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs has named 15 distinguished faculty.
In graduate school Peter Wilf published his first paper in the journal Paleobiology. So, the geosciences professor said being named a Fellow of the Paleontological Society, which publishes the journal, was an extra special honor.
Never has the world been better positioned to predict and respond to natural disasters. The stream of data at our fingertips is seemingly endless. But the size of this mounting trove of information in itself poses a problem. For example, running flood calculations for a city facing heavy rains using a century of data is highly accurate. But the calculation is useless if it takes days or weeks to compute.
There's still time to purchase tickets for the EMS Gala, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences' (EMS) formal event for students, faculty and staff.
Penn State geosciences researchers are investigating an active volcano that could pose a hazard to millions of people in Nicaragua. Masaya volcano is located in an active volcanic and seismic zone and is nearby Managua, Nicaragua's capital. The researchers are using many methods, including drones, to study how the volcano and surrounding earth are changing over time. The drones are able to capture high-quality video footage and travel to places inaccessible to humans.