NASA is partnering with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to develop and apply new technology and products to better manage and monitor the state’s water resources and respond to its ongoing drought.
NASA scientists, DWR water managers, university researchers and other state resource management agencies will collaborate to apply advanced remote sensing and improved forecast modeling to better assess water resources, monitor drought conditions and water supplies, plan for drought response and mitigation, and measure drought impacts. (more…)
Unprecedented snowpack maps from NASA’s prototype Airborne Snow Observatory mission helped water managers for 2.6 million residents of the San Francisco Bay Area achieve near-perfect water operations this summer, despite the driest year in California’s recorded history.
The high-resolution NASA snow maps of the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada helped optimize reservoir filling and hydroelectric generation at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and its O’Shaughnessy Dam. This resulted in a full reservoir at the end of the snowmelt season, no water spillage, and generation of more than $3.9 million in hydropower. The NASA data helped optimize operations during the last two critical weeks of runoff. (more…)
Question: “What did you do this summer?” Answer: “I built the Advanced Light Source.”
It’s the rare undergraduate who can say they spent their vacation building a third-generation synchrotron, but that’s exactly what Seno Rekawa did in the summer of 1991 as an intern at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It was an auspicious start to his career. Less than five years later, he was working as a full-time engineer at Berkeley Lab and now is a regular mentor to budding high school and college engineers.
Berkeley Lab’s Center for Science and Engineering Education (CSEE), with its range of internship offerings, helps to fulfill one of the Lab’s mandates, which is to inspire and prepare this country’s next generation of scientists, engineers and technicians. This year more than 70 current and recent college students and almost 20 high school and college instructors participated in a CSEE program, working with Berkeley Lab researchers on science projects spanning from cancer research to cosmology to biofuels. (more…)
Read the improbable story of a Microsoft employee who twice turned down a traditional tech sector job so he could teach high school students, and then landed his dream job.
REDMOND, Wash. — Kevin Wang could have followed his career.
Instead, he chose to follow his calling.
It was the early 2000s, and Wang had just graduated from Berkeley with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He was trying to decide which tech company he should offer his services to, when a high school came calling. (more…)
A person’s style of speech — not just the pitch of his or her voice — may help determine whether the listener perceives the speaker to be male or female, according to a University of Colorado Boulder researcher who studied transgender people transitioning from female to male.
The way people pronounce their “s” sounds and the amount of resonance they use when speaking contributes to the perception of gender, according to Lal Zimman, whose findings are based on research he completed while earning his doctoral degree from CU-Boulder’s linguistics department. (more…)
