2012
Green kites in Beijing
CNET, December 24, 2012
One of the best ways to spend a Sunday is to go to the watch the kites or fly your own. Unfortunately, these days the sky isn't so blue with all the pollution. Well, now the kites are fighting back. Deren Guler, a CMU physics alumna and Xiaowei Wang's company Float, attaches pollution sensors to kites...read more
Immaculate Reception was game-changer for Steelers, Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, December 24, 2012
A split-second‘s worth of improvisational genius by Franco Harris turned around a game that was lost, a franchise that had gone nowhere for 40 years and the consciousness of a city just beginning to undergo seismic upheaval. New video footage and physics tests done 10 years ago at Carnegie Mellon explain what really happened during the Immaculate Reception...read more
'Greatest play' turns 40 today
Steelers.com and Gameday Magazine, December 23, 2012
There have been roughly 1,500,000 plays in NFL history spread over more than 14,600 games, starting all the way back in 1920. There never has been a play like the Immaculate Reception. Research by emeritus professor of physics John Fetkovich explains the Immaculate Reception...read more
Citizen Smart-Kites Check China's Air
Wired, December 20, 2012
Physics alumna Deren Guler and designer Xiaowei Wang are using sensor-laden kites to monitor China’s air. Beijing’s air quality is notoriously terrible. It’s so bad that China’s leaders have begun to seal themselves off, all the while producing air-quality reports of extremely dubious accuracy. Earlier this summer, Guler and Wang took to the skies of Beijing to begin challenging the official story, attaching air-quality sensors to kites and publishing the results...read more
New Tool is probing the structure of the Milky Way's heart
Opli, December 20, 2012
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, of which CMU is a member, announces the discover of hundreds of stars orbiting around the center of our galaxy...read more
Global GPS Infrastructure Vulnerable to Attack
Tech News Daily, December 11, 2012
Research by MCS/SCS senior Tyler Nighswander estimates that up to 30 percent of the world's GPS infrastructure could be taken offline by a 45-second message sent from equipment that costs $2,500...read more
The SciArt Buzz is Back! December 2012
Scientific American, December 11, 2012
Events at the intersection of science and art include the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation's exhibit "Portraits of a Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Florilegium"...read more
Safety Testing System for Development of New Chemicals Propsed to Avoid Harmful Endocrine Disruptors
Medical News Today, Laboratory Equipment, R&D Magazine, December 11, 2012
A group of scientists from North America and Europe, including Carnegie Mellon University's Terry Collins, has developed a five-tiered testing system that manufacturers can use to ensure that the chemicals and consumer products they produce are free of harmful endocrine disrupting chemicals like BPA or DDT...read more
Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences restored for promising students
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 8, 2012
The Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences, which fell victim in 2009 to Pennsylvania's budget crisis, is being resurrected this summer at Carnegie Mellon University with help from a state grant and matching private funds, officials confirmed Friday...read more
Researchers craft tool to minimize threat of endocrine disruptors in new chemicals
e! Science News, December 6, 2012
A consortium of institutions have developed a safety testing system to help chemists design inherently safer chemicals and processes...read more
Stopping endocrine disruptors in their tracks
Chemistry World, December 6, 2012
US scientists have come up with a system to assess whether a chemist's latest synthetic product is an endocrine disruptor – a chemical that interferes with hormone regulation in animals and humans...read more
Semiconductor funnel could boost solar cells
Physics World, December 4, 2012
Computer simulations by researchers in the US and China could lead to solar cells that work efficiently across a broad range of the solar spectrum. Dubbed a "solar energy funnel", the new concept offers a way of using strain to modify the band gap of a semiconductor so that it responds to light within a range of different wavelengths...read more
Pitt Med School, Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Share $9.3 Million Grant to Establish Biomedical Technology Research Center
Global Pittsburgh News, December 3, 2012
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) have been awarded a five-year, $9.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a Biomedical Technology Research Center (BTRC) to develop computational tools for modeling and simulating biological systems from the tissue level down to the molecular level...read more
Pitt, CMU, Supercomputing Center win grant for biomedical technology
PIttsburgh Post-Gazette, December 3, 2012
The National Institutes of Health have awarded a $9.3 million grant to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Carnegie Mellon University and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to establish a biomedical technology research center...read more
NIH Gives 9.3 million to a Pittsburgh-based computing team
The Baltimore Sun, December 3, 2012
Three Pennsylvania institutions and a California organization have received National Institutes of Health funding approval for a computational modeling initiative...read more
Researchers create GPNAs to supress tumor growth
The Tartan, December 3, 2012
Chemistry professors Danith Ly and Bruce Armitage, chemistry post-doctoral researcher Srinivas Rapireddy, and chemistry graduate student Raman Bahal teamed up with multiple researchers at the University of Pittsburgh to look into the prospect of using peptide nucleic acids as an alternative to current treatments that target the growth of a tumor at the molecular level...read more
AAAS Members Elected as Fellows
AAAS, December 1, 2012
Biological Sciences Professor Chein Ho has been named a fellow of the American Assocaition for the Advancement of Science...read more
Pitt, CMU and PSC get $9.3 milllion grant
Pittsburgh Business Times, November 30, 2012
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Carnegie Mellon University and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have been awarded a five-year $9.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Healthto establish the Biomedical Technology Research Center, which will develop tools for modeling biological systems...read more