College-wide featured stories
March Madness goes hi-tech
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The event has been touted as a new kind of “March Madness,” playing on the frenzy that develops this time of year around basketball and other winter sports tournaments.
Celestial tsunamis
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Fifty years ago this week, the United States entered the Space Age with the launch of its first satellite, Explorer I. The spacecraft made history by finding the first of two Earth-girdling radiation belts that threaten satellite electronics–and astronauts.
Dry spells spelled trouble in old China
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History does not record whether Chongzhen, the last of China’s Ming emperors, appreciated his country’s summer rains. Let’s hope he did while they lasted, because new evidence suggests a letup in those rains could have fueled the popular uprising that toppled Chongzhen and his 276-year-old dynasty in A.D. 1644.
Road salt accumulates in metro-area waters, a new study finds
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Road salt used throughout the winter is making the state’s lakes, rivers, and groundwater saltier, a situation that could harm aquatic life and drinking water, according to a University of Minnesota study. But additional training of snow plow drivers and more judicious use of road salt could help lessen the impact and save the state money.
Power from the sun
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Growing up, Jane Davidson went to an all-girls high school and didn’t know any engineers. But the University of Minnesota professor of mechanical engineering was good at math and science, and she had a chemistry teacher who encouraged her to enter the field of engineering.
Transforming communities
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Just a decade ago, visitors to the East St. Louis, Illinois, neighborhood of Emerson Park were greeted by vacant homes, broken streetlights, and a 25 percent unemployment rate. The suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, was a classic example of urban decline. Once a thriving area, the neighborhood gradually lost population and tax base as factories and businesses moved elsewhere, leaving behind abandoned buildings and industrial pollution.
The honor of a lifetime
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If the U.S. Senate is, as it has been called, “the most exclusive club in the world,” the National Academy of Sciences must be the second. It elects members from the cream of the the country’s scientific crop, and this year it added two from the University of Minnesota: Don Truhlar, chemistry, and David Kohlstedt, geology and geophysics.
Taking the plunge for science wins Ig Nobel Award
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Chemical engineering and materials science professor Ed Cussler and his former student Brian Gettelfinger (ChemE ’04) have joined the immortal ranks of scientists whose work tickles the funny bone while making a serious scientific point.
Superheroes blast fear-of-science barrier
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A few years ago physics professor James Kakalios enlisted the help of comic book superheroes to help students in a new freshman seminar explore basic principles of science.
The end of physics as we know it?
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Like Alice taking the plunge down a rabbit hole, the world’s physicists today went underground in search of exotic forms of matter, extra dimensions of space, and an answer to the question of how matter acquires mass. The biggest experiment in physics got its start 100 meters below the French-Swiss border near Geneva, when a mammoth machine called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, had its first trial run.