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Catch up on the latest IU faculty and staff news with the Sept. 10 issue of IU Home Pages.
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IU Bloomington Geography Professor Sarah Pryor discusses work she and University of Iowa statistician Johannes Ledolter have done on climate change. Earlier this year, Pryor and other IU climate scientists met with colleagues and industry and government representatives from the state of Indiana to discuss the feasibility of wind energy as a local source of power.
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Challenges in quantitative verification for ubiquitous computing
Wednesday, Sept. 29
1-2:30 p.m.
State Room East, IMU, IU Bloomington
Marta Kwiatkowska of the University of Oxford will discuss the ways in which future computing systems will have to be adapted to new technologies, such as intelligent buildings, environmental monitoring, health care monitoring and automotive software. Quantitative verification is able to automatically establish properties of a system model such as "the probability of an airbag failing to deploy within 0.02s" and "the expected time for a network protocol to send a packet." Tools such as the probabilistic model checker PRISM are widely used for ubiquitous computing, including security and network protocols.
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Scientist at Work: James Glazier
Anyone who's ever stared at foams atop glasses of beer or soda knows not all bubbles are equal. Some bubbles are big. Some bubbles are small. Some bubbles grow. Others shrink. Some bubbles pop, while other bubbles persevere, buoyed by forces unseen. "We run into foams every day," said Indiana University Bloomington Physics Professor James Glazier, who -- among his diverse portfolio of scientific projects -- has studied the physics of frothy materials. "As foams sit around, bubbles seem to get bigger. People assume that's because bubbles are popping. Bubbles do pop, but that's not why other bubbles get bigger. Gas is actually moving from smaller bubbles to bigger bubbles."
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A first draft of the cacao genome is complete, a consortium of academic, governmental, and industry scientists announced recently. IU Bloomington scientists performed much of the sequencing work, which is described and detailed at the official website of the Cacao Genome Database project. Despite being led and funded by a private company, Mars Inc., Cacao Genome Database scientists say one of their chief concerns has been making sure the Theobroma cacao genome data was published for all to see -- especially cacao farmers and breeders in West Africa, Asia and South America, who can use genetic information to improve their planting stocks and protect their often-fragile incomes.
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The next generation of neutron research at IU Bloomington has received a $5 million boost from the National Institute for Standards and Technology. A recently awarded NIST grant provides close to $1 million a year for five years to support cooperative research activities between the Low Energy Neutron Source (LENS) at IU Bloomington and NIST's National Center for Neutron Research, located in Gaithersburg, Md. The newly funded agreement between LENS and NIST's NCNR builds on a previous three-year partnership between the two research groups.
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If two of the greatest scientists who ever lived were dedicated alchemists, then alchemy needs a makeover, a big one, contend Johns Hopkins University chemist Lawrence Principe and his colleague William Newman, a historian of science at Indiana University Bloomington. Back in the day, the two argue, alchemy was not the misguided pseudoscience that most people think it was. Rather, it was a valuable and necessary phase in the development of modern chemistry.
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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has awarded $364,000 to more than double the capacity of the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC), an institute of IU Bloomington. The BDSC houses 30,000 Drosophila melanogaster strains and helps develop scientific tools that are used to design new fly strains. The new grant will allow the BDSC to renovate and expand the facility so it can curate 60,000-70,000 different genetic fruit fly variants that are important for research.
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Chemists at IU Bloomington have designed a molecule that binds chloride ions -- but can be conveniently compelled to release the ions in the presence of ultraviolet light. Reporting in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (online), IU Bloomington chemist Amar Flood and Ph.D. student Yuran Hua explain how they designed the molecule, how it works and, just as importantly, how they know it works.
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Environmental scientists seeking new ways to sense and diagnose impending environmental and human health disasters returned from Maine in August with new ideas about how to use a common water flea species, Daphnia pulex, as a modern era equivalent to the coal mine canary. The nine-day event at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) was a course for veteran scientists and scientists-in-training -- taught by a diverse array of scholars -- who are collectively creating a new field of science called "environmental genomics," largely centered around water flea genomes.
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The August 17, 2010, issue of IU Discoveries featured transportation geographer William Black, who has written a new book about how every mode of transportation can be made sustainable in a modern world. Also included were stories about an expansion of the TransPAC network, the energy costs of immune reactions, microbial mutation rates, a new tool to gauge the influence of scholarly publications, science education, and some promising uses for purple coneflower.
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Some recent titles by IU researchers
"Hybrid Incompatibility 'Snowballs' Between Solanum Species," Science, Sept. 17, 2010, by L.C. Moyle and T. Nakazato
"Scaling expectations for the time to establishment of complex adaptations," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sept. 7, 2010, by Michael Lynch
"Analysis of Site-Specific Glycosylation of Renal and Hepatic Glutamyl Transpeptidase from Normal Human Tissue," Journal of Biological Chemistry, Sept. 7, 2010, by M.B. West, Z.M. Segu, C.L. Feasley, P. Kang, I. Klouckova, C. Li, M.V. Novotny, C.M. West, Y. Mechref, and M.H. Hanigan
"Matrisibs, patrisibs, and the evolution of imprinting on autosomes and sex chromosomes," American Naturalist, Oct. 2010, by Y. Brandvain
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The IU Jacobs School of Music has a new Web site. Check out the new design and learn more about the Jacobs School.
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