4.21
Katherine Unger Baillie
Senior Science News Officer
kbaillie@upenn.edu
The student-led project will reimagine the campus of West Philadelphia’s Andrew Hamilton School, including vegetable gardens, a food forest, and other green stormwater-management tools.
In Aurora MacRae-Crerar’s Penn Global Seminar, students are grappling with the impacts of a shifting and unpredictable climate in Mongolia.
An international research team, including Hermann Pfefferkorn of the School of Arts & Sciences, has solved the mystery of where 300-million-year-old specimens fit into the plant family tree.
Penn researchers are studying the propensity of SARS-CoV-2 to cross between species, and they are working to protect people, pets, and wildlife from COVID-19 infection.
Penn Today spoke with experts in various areas of science and environmental policy about what they anticipate will shift now that President Biden has assumed the nation’s leadership.
History course looks at Pennsylvania’s role in helping fossil fuel power the making of the modern world.
Changing conditions have taken a toll on insects in the tropics, according to research by School of Arts & Sciences biologists Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs. But education and science offer a path forward, they say.
Earlier this year, Penn Medicine epidemiologist Doug Wiebe glimpsed two small all-white birds outside Van Pelt Library that turned out to be albino house sparrows. Their coloration is likely the result of a genetic condition in which a bird’s feathers lack pigment.
From Penn Engineering’s GRASP Lab, Treeswift uses swarms of autonomous, flying robots equipped with LiDAR sensors to monitor, inventory, and map timberland.
World-renowned paleontologist Peter Dodson names his greatest accomplishment: being a mentor.
Katherine Unger Baillie
Senior Science News Officer
kbaillie@upenn.edu
Jennifer Wilcox of the School of Engineering and Applied Science spoke about companies pledging to eliminate their carbon emissions within decades. “Carbon removal shouldn’t be seen as a get-out-of-jail-free card,” she said. “It has a role to play, particularly for sectors that are very difficult to decarbonize, but it shouldn’t be an excuse for everyone to keep emitting greenhouse gases indefinitely.”
FULL STORY →
Vincent Reina of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design spoke about how class affects access to sustainable energy alternatives. “For higher income individuals, it's a function of choice," he said. "For lower income individuals, it's a function of constraints.”
FULL STORY →
Marilyn Howarth of the Perelman School of Medicine says oil rain, a byproduct of oil production, can be carcinogenic. “The oil itself can contain traces of heavy metals, arsenic, and radioactivity, which could be a source of lung cancer,” she said.
FULL STORY →
Lauren Sallan of the School of Arts & Sciences spoke about the end of the Devonian period 359 million years ago, in which the ozone layer was damaged, resulting in a mass extinction. The discovery is significant to today’s climate change research.
FULL STORY →
Anil Vachani of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke about the combined effects of air pollution and coronavirus on marginalized communities. “We’re certainly recognizing that exposure to chronic air pollution results in a number of adverse health outcomes which are increasingly recognized. It may even contribute to a whole host of other illnesses that we’re now understanding the links to, to poor air quality and air pollution,” he said.
FULL STORY →
Research into rare earth metals by Eric Schelter, Patrick Carroll, Ph.D. student Justin Bogart, and alumnus Connor Lippincott of the School of Arts and Sciences was cited.
FULL STORY →