The online class for all ages, which starts Jan. 8, is worth one college credit and will teach students about how rare the eclipse is and what to expect.
A new study by a team of international scientists including Liliana M. Dávalos, professor of conservation biology from Stony Brook University's Department of Ecology and Evolution, reveals that it would take 3 million years to recover the number of species that went extinct from human activity on Madagascar. Published in Nature Communications, the study also projects that if currently threatened species go extinct on Madagascar, recovering them would take more than 20 million years much longer than what has previously been found on any other island archipelago in the world. From unique baobab species to lemurs, the island of Madagascar is one of the world's most important biodiversity hotspots. Approximately 90 percent of its species of plants and animals are found nowhere else. After humans settled on the island about 2,500 years ago, Madagascar experienced many extinctions, including giant lemurs, elephant birds and dwarf hippos. Yet unlike most islands, Madagascar'
Innovative Research Supported by NSF Could Lead to More Sustainable Agricultural Practices Imagine being able to develop a low-cost and sustainable fertilizer that improves the production of crops and plant growth by repurposing the massive amounts of biomass waste that exist worldwide. This is the goal of Benjamin S. Hsiao, distinguished professor of chemistry at Stony Brook University. He and colleagues at Stony Brook and University of Queensland in Australia (led by Darren Martin, professor of chemical engineering) are embarking on a project to achieve this. The research, which would enhance sustainability practices and therefore have an impact on pollution and climate change, is being supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of its Convergence Accelerator Program on sustainable materials solutions and capabilities. The use of conventional fertilizers in agriculture worldwide is not sustainable for several reasons. These include high delivery inefficiency,
Alan Alda and Irina Petrushina were both honored by the New York Academy of Sciences at its 2022 Gala, held November 14 at Cipriani 25 Broadway in New York City. Alda was given the Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award for Communicating Science, while Petrushina, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, was one of nine honorees in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the 2021 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists. She received a personalized award medal and an unrestricted personal cash prize of $10,000. Petrushina was recognized for her "astonishing contributions to the field of modern accelerator physics." An accelerator is a device that is used to propel charged particles, such as electrons, to extremely high energies, and these devices are critically important to scientists who are looking to answer some of the most fundamental questions in high energy physics. Her work on the new photo-gun design dramatically improved th