Blog

Student’s Curiosity Produces Ecological Buzz

Environment, Nature

Students studying what they love is a well-established principle at Brown. For Tyler Coverdale, that meant the outdoors, the environment, and, ultimately, some provocative research on Cape Cod salt marshes through GIS-assisted analysis of historical aerial photography. He loves it.

Tyler Coverdale’s newly published study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment on the collapse of salt marsh habitats along Cape Cod tells an intriguing, if unfortunate, tale of how three different human activities spanning 70 years finally added up to a problem that no one anticipated. The story of how he made the discovery — which is generating some buzz in ecology — while a Brown undergraduate is a tale of happier serendipities. (more…)

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Vocabulary Instruction Failing U.S. Students

Education

Vocabulary instruction in the early years is not challenging enough to prepare students for long-term reading comprehension, argues a study led by a Michigan State University education researcher.

The study, which appears in Elementary School Journal, analyzed commonly used reading curricula in U.S. kindergarten classrooms. It found that, generally, the programs do not teach enough vocabulary words; the words aren’t challenging enough; and not enough focus is given to make sure students understand the meaning of the words. (more…)

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IBM Delivers New Software and Cloud Services to Accelerate Social Business

Technology

ARMONK, N.Y. – 28 Jan 2013: IBM today announced new software and cloud-based services to help business leaders, such as chief marketing officers and chief human resource officers, advance their organization’s transformation with the adoption of social business technology. The new offerings will help business leaders integrate IBM’s industry-leading social networking and analytics technologies into their business processes to empower the 21st Century workforce and transform client experiences. (more…)

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Teenagers Avoid Early Alcohol Misuse Through Personality Management

Health

In a study published in the very first issue of the new journal JAMA Psychiatry, researchers from Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center, University of Montreal and King’s College London have shown that personality-targeted school interventions delivered to high risk adolescents manage to reduce and postpone problem drinking, which is responsible for 9% of the deaths in young people between the ages of 15 and 29 in developed countries. Furthermore, by delaying alcohol uptake in at-risk youth, low-risk youth apparently gain group immunity due to reduced drinking within their social network. (more…)

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UCLA’s New Nano-Lens Microscopes Can Detect Viruses, Other Objects at Nanoscale

Science

By using tiny liquid lenses that self-assemble around microscopic objects, a team from UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has created an optical microscopy method that allows users to directly see objects more than 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Coupled with computer-based computational reconstruction techniques, this portable and cost-effective platform, which has a wide field of view, can detect individual viruses and nanoparticles, making it potentially useful in the diagnosis of diseases in point-of-care settings or areas where medical resources are limited. (more…)

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Pushing Boundaries

Science

Engineers report research milestones in fuel cells, flexible composites

Faculty and students in the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering continue to blaze a trail of innovation, reporting recent research milestones in flexible composites and fuel cells. (more…)

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