Hands-on activities broaden engineering students’ view of thermodynamics
Carbon dioxide, candle wax, a hobby rocket and water would not seem to have much in common but they all were among the topics presented by 14 students in the Honors sections of the course MEEG341 Thermodynamics on Wednesday, Dec. 5, as a means to cement classroom learning.
“I want students to leave the course knowing there are many uses for what they learn in this class, learning that they can apply later on as real-world engineers,” said Lian-Ping Wang, a mechanical engineering professor who holds a joint appointment as professor of physical ocean science and engineering. (more…)
*Climate changes profoundly influenced the rise and fall of six distinct, successive waves of mammal species diversity in North America over the last 65 million years, shows a novel statistical analysis led by Brown University evolutionary biologists. Warming and cooling periods, in two cases confounded by species migrations, marked the transition from one dominant grouping to the next.*
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — History often seems to happen in waves — fashion and musical tastes turn over every decade and empires give way to new ones over centuries. A similar pattern characterizes the last 65 million years of natural history in North America, where a novel quantitative analysis has identified six distinct, consecutive waves of mammal species diversity or “evolutionary faunas.” What force of history determined the destiny of these groupings? The numbers say it was typically climate change.
“Although we’ve always known in a general way that mammals respond to climatic change over time, there has been controversy as to whether this can be demonstrated in a quantitative fashion,” said Christine Janis, professor of evolutionary biology at Brown University. “We show that the rise and fall of these faunas is indeed correlated with climatic change — the rise or fall of global paleotemperatures — and also influenced by other more local perturbations such as immigration events.” (more…)
