Tim Scott's blog

The Central Pennsylvania Consortium's Annual Astronomers' Meeting will be held in the Tome Hall of the Rector Science Building at Dickinson College, 343 West Louther Street, Carlisle, on Saturday, April 21st, 2012. The featured speaker at this year's meeting will be Debra Fischer from Yale University. Her presentation will be "Searching for Earths".

All interested in the wonderful field of astronomy and educated in said area are encouraged to consider presenting a contributed talk or a poster for the poster session. The Consortium usually has been able to allocate 10-15 minuted per presentation, depending upon the number of people wanting to participate or present. Students are particularly encouraged to contribute talks. 

A tentative meeting agenda is as follows: 8:15-9:00 is Registration; 9:00-10:30 is Session I Contributed Talks; 10:30-11:30 is Poster Session; 11:30-1:00 is Lunch; 1:00-2:00 is the presentation by Debra Fischer "Searching for Earths"; 2:00-2:30 is Coffee Break; 2:30-4:00 Session II Contributed Talks.

For more information and to register for the meeting, please visit the following website http://centralpennsylvaniaconsortium.org.

West Chester University's Science Departments is proud to announce and cordially invites all to participate in the 2012 All-Science Poster Session.

This years All-Science Poster Session will be held on Friday May 4th, 2012, from 10 to 1PM.

With this event, students have the opportunity to show off their undergraduate and or graduate research work and receive recognition for outstanding achievement in the realm of scientific research. Of the undergraduate posters displayed, the All-Science Poster Session Committee will judge which of the posters are best in show and award prizes for accordingly. First place will receive $100, second place $75, and third place $50. The best poster for graduate students will be in its own contest and the prize here is $100 (Faculty are not eligible for prizes).

To submit a poster for consideration in the All-Science Poster Session, students must: submit original work performed in one's capacity as a West Chester University Student; submit the abstract, which is limited to 150 words (Times New Roman, 12 pt), by April 20th, 2012; submit the abstracts in the format cited on the flyer attached to this page; and submit them to Dr. Auld via email at jauld@wcupa.edu.

Failure to following the above requirements or appropriate abstract format will result in the return of the your abstract for correction.

For poster printing services please contact your home department.

For more information please contact one of the All-Science Poster Session Committee Members: Dr. Azam at mazam@wcupa.edu, Dr. Nikitina at dnikitina@wcupa.edu, Dr. Auld at jauld@wcupa.edu, Dr. Phares at gphares@wcupa.edu, or Dr. Pagan at opagan@wcupa.edu.

The Delaware Valley Paleontological Society and the Philadelphia Mineralogical Society are two groups of dedicated amateurs and professional with a great passion for fossils and minerals.

Each year the two (non-profit) societies combine their efforts to display specimens from their collections, provide educational opportunities for the general public and to raise funds to support the ongoing programs and activities of the societies.

This year, the Delaware Valley Paleontological Society and the Philadelphia Mineralogical Society will present a joint show and sale at the LuLu Temple, 5140 Butler Pike, in Plymouth Meeting, PA. Just two miles from the Norristown exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The show and sale will include fossils, minerals, gems, speakers and exhibits; learning activities, including a fossil dig and kid's mineral corner; food, door prizes throughout and Scouting Merit Badge information.

The event will take place on Saturday, March 31st, from 10:00AM to 5:00PM, and Sunday, April 1st, from 10:00AM to 4:00PM. Admissions is $5.00; kids under twelve get in for $1.00. All uniformed Scouts are free. For more information, please visit, www.philamineralsociety.org.

The West Chester-County Branch of the American Association of University Women is offering a $1,000.00 academic scholarship to a deserving student attending Cheyney University, Immaculata University or West Chester University.

The scholarship will be applied toward tuition expenses for the upcoming 2012-2013 academic year.

The application deadline is March 26th, 2012. All applications must be postmarked or emailed on or before this date. To do so, please use the 'Contact Us' form and check Scholarship Committee under the 'About Us' section of wccpa.aaua.net to confrim you submission.

The requirements a scholarship recipient must be a resident of the United States of America or a permanent resident; a full or part time undergraduate student who has completed at least 60 hours of credits prior to the spring semester of 2012; at least 25 years old; enrolled for the 2012-2013 academic year at Cheyney, Immaculata, or West Chester; and have a GPA of at least 3.0 (out of 4.).

Completed application requirements include: a recommendation from a professor using the AAUW required form; a one page outline of future educational and career goals based on your personal and educational experience; a completed financial needs form; a cumulative transcript of undergraduate work; and a completed signature/certification of accurate application form.

For access to the application, please visit the following link. For questions, please contact one of the scholarship coordinators, Sue Johnson at sueearli@verizon.net or Mimi Jones at DANADMIM1@verizon.net.

A reconstruction depicts the swampy land that was covered up 300 Million years ago.

Researchers have uncovered a forest in northern China preserved under a layer of ash deposited 300 Million years ago. Preservation of the forest, just west of the Inner Mongolian district of Wuda, has been likened to that of the Italian city of Pompeii. The researchers were able to reconstruct nearly 1,000 sq m. of the forest's trees and plant distributions.

This rare insight into how the region once looked is described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The excavations sampled three sites across a large expanse that was covered with about a metre of ash.

Due to the pristine preservation of some of the plants, the team estimate the ash fell over the course of just a few days, felling and damaging some of the trees and plants under its weight but otherwise keeping them intact.

"It's marvelously preserved," said study co-author Hermann Pfefferkorn of the Unversity of Pennsylvania in the US. "We can stand there and find a branch with the leaves atached, and then we find the next branch and the next branch and the next branch. And then we find the stump from the same tree. That's really exciting."

Friday, November 18th, 2011, 9:30-10:45 AM, Room MER 113
President for a Day: Understanding the Complexities of Energy, Nuclear Power and Politics
Presented by Michael Kurzeja, MBA, BS
Performance Improvement Analyst, Exelon Nuclear

For more information, please contact Dr. Gary Schmidt (ESS102) and Dr. Karen Vanlandingham (ESS111) [Sponsors of the Special Guest Lecture].

(Oldest Fossil Rodents in South America Discovered; Find Is 10 Million Years Older and Confirms Animal From Africa)

In a literal walk through time along the Ucayali River near Contamana, Peru, a team of researchers found rodent fossils at least 41 million years old -- by far the oldest on the South American continent. The remains -- teeth -- showed these mouse- and rat-size animals are most closely related to African rodents, confirming the hypothesis that early rodents of South America had origins in Africa, said Darin Croft, an anatomy professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and member of the research team.

This discovery supports the contention that rodents landed in the north and spread south. The rodents are from the suborder Caviomorpha, the group that includes living rodents such as guinea pigs, chinchillas, and New World porcupines. The fossils from this group are only about 32 million years old in central Chile and about 30 million years old in Patagonia, Argentina,. Taken all together, the pattern contradicts the theory of a northward expansion deduced from the fossil record 20 years ago. The findings, which describe three new species, are published online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.This really pushes back the date of the first South American rodents," said Croft, a paleontologist who specializes in mammalian evolution.

Pierre-Olivier Antoine, a professor of paleontology in the Institute of Evolutionary Sciences at Montpellier University in southern France, asked Croft to join the team of scientists from France, Germany, Peru and Panama. Members first flew into the region in 2008, after reading Harvard Geology Professor Bernhard Kummel's 1948 description of the area. Kummel mentions fossils along the Ucayali, a major tributary of the Amazon, but the team found no evidence that anyone had investigated them.

During three trips from 2008 to 2010, Antoine's group found the fossils in a portion of the riverbank exposed when the water level is low. The geology along the river showed that layers of rock, including the fossil layer, had been pushed up in a rainbow-shaped fold, called an anticline. The layers that had once been above or below the fossils turned from horizontal to nearly vertical. Instead of digging down to the past, the scientists walked downstream from the fossil layer to go back in time, upstream to go forward in time.

A new geological study, being reported Thursday in the journal Nature, showed that tools from a site near Lake Turkana in Kenya were made about 1.76 million years ago, the earliest of their ilk found so far.

Previous dates were estimates ranging from 1.4 million to 1.6 million years ago.

Although no erectus fossils were found with the Turkana tools, a skull of that species was excavated last year in the same sediment level across the lake. This suggests that Homo erectus was responsible for these particular tools, which were made with what scientists refer to as Acheulean technology. The term connotes the type of oval and pear-shaped hand axes and other implements that were a specialty of early humans.

American researchers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, established the age of the Turkana tools by dating the surrounding mudstone with a paleomagnetic technique. When layers of silt and clay hardened into stone, this preserved the orientation of Earth’s magnetic field at the time, and an analysis of the periodic polarity reversals and other records yielded the age of the site known as Kokiselei.

“I was taken aback when I realized that the geological data indicated it was the oldest Acheulean site in the world,” said the lead author of the report, Christopher J. Lepre, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty who also teaches geology at Rutgers University.

The assemblage of hand axes, picks and other cutting tools was collected, mostly in the 1990s, by French archaeologists led by Hélène Roche of the National Center for Scientific Research in France. Dr. Roche, a co-author of the paper, was steered to the site by Richard Leakey, the Kenyan fossil hunter who had discovered, just six miles away, the Turkana Boy, a young Homo erectus who lived about 1.5 million years ago and is the most complete early hominid skeleton found so far.

An team led by KU Leuven astronomer Leen Decin discovered not less than a dozen cold dust arcs around the giant star CW Leo.

The team used the sensitive PACS instrument on board the Herschel Space Observatory to detect for the first time arcs of dust far away from the star. CW Leo has expelled these shells of dust in different epochs in its life. The faintest shell we can see now was, according to the team, expelled about 16,000 years ago. In the meantime it has drifted away from the star over more than 7,000 billion kilometers.

Until recently, the environment of giant stars seemed homogeneous, but more and more observations indicate that this is not true," says Leen Decin. These new Herschel images confirm that in a stunning way. We have detected a dozen arcs, puffed out by the star in the course of its life. The faintest shell we found is already at a distance of 7,000 billion kilometers from the star.

The different shells were ejected by the star with intervals of 500 to 1,700 years. The astronomers in the team believe such shells, even fainter, are also present further out, up to the violent bow shock where the expelled material of the star collides with the interstellar medium. The oldest shells have probably disappeared in the bow shock already.

Our own Sun too will turn into a red giant star, about five billion years from now, when it will inflate and condensate dust in the outer, cooling layers of its atmosphere. The episodes in CW Leo's history help astronomers understand the future of our own Sun.