The Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State is focusing its fall 2025 EarthTalks series on needs, opportunities and research in critical minerals. Ten public seminars through early December will highlight ongoing work and viewpoints both at the University and across the sector, including at the federal level.

Research Professor Tim White and postdoctoral scholar Nick Sullivan will give a public talk, “Patterns and processes of lithium enrichment in coal measure strata from the Northern Appalachian Basin,” at 4 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 27, in 112 Walker Building at Penn State University Park.

By removing oxygen during synthesis, a team led by materials scientists at Penn State created seven new high-entropy oxides, or HEOs: a class of ceramics composed of five or more metals with potential for applications in energy storage, electronics and protective coatings.

Jennifer Baka, associate professor of geography, was named a 2025 fellow of the Institute of Energy and the Environment. 

Sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean is at one of its lowest levels on record, yet there’s no unanimity on when that ice will disappear completely during summer months. Understanding the traits and movements of the remaining ice is a persistent challenge for scientists, but a study by researchers at Penn State has provided a new tool to explore ice characteristics and interactions along with coastal conditions. 

With nonlinear optical microscopy — a specialized imaging technique that looks for a change in the color of intense laser light — researchers can collect data on how the light interacts with the sample and, through time-consuming and sometimes expensive analyses, characterize the material’s structure and other properties. Now, researchers at Penn State have developed a computational framework that can interpret the nonlinear optical microscopy images to characterize the material in microscopic detail.

Clive Randall, Evan Pugh University Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has been elected as a fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. The academy is an international scientific organization composed of the world’s leading scientists, scholars and engineers, dedicated to promoting excellence in science and technology.

Frozen in time, ancient microbes or their remains could be found in Martian ice deposits during future missions to the Red Planet. By recreating Mars-like conditions in the lab, a team of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Penn State demonstrated that fragments of the molecules that make up proteins in E. coli bacteria, if present in Mars’ permafrost and ice caps, could remain intact for over 50 million years, despite harsh and continuous exposure to cosmic radiation.

For billions of years, Earth’s continents have remained remarkably stable, forming the foundation for mountains, ecosystems and civilizations. But the secret to their stability has mystified scientists for more than a century. Now, a new study by researchers at Penn State and Columbia University provides the clearest evidence yet for how the landforms became and remained so stable — and the key ingredient is heat. 

Benjamin Edelstein, an assistant professor of economics at Loyola University Chicago, will lead a seminar at Penn State on the effects of water-scarcity management in part of the western United States on October 22.