Knight Innovation Awards: An Interview with Honoree Neil deGrasse Tyson

Jeff Jarvis (Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism) and Dr. Tyson explore the universe -- and have a lot of fun doing it -- in this in-depth and wide-ranging interview. This video was recorded on October 14, 2015 during the Knight Innovation Awards at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Is Beauty Only Skin Deep? Mate Selection in Guppies

Our experiment sought to understand mate preference in female guppies, Poecilia reticulata. We observed behavioral differences between wild-type males caught from a local indoor pond and vibrant pet store males, who exhibited higher stress levels, likely due in part to being shipped long distances. Observing these behavioral differences, we hypothesized that females would prefer the less stressed males regardless of color. When a female guppy was presented with both a wild type and a pet store male, we predicted that she would prefer the wild-type male on account of their lower stress

Drought monitoring: a system for tracking plant available soil moisture based on the Oklahoma Mesonet

Real-time drought monitoring is essential for early detection and adaptive management to mitigate the negative impacts of drought on the people, economy, and ecosystems of Oklahoma, and improved drought monitoring is a key need identified in the 1995 Update of the Oklahoma Comprehensive Water Plan. Drought impacts can be severe in Oklahoma. For example, the 2006 drought cost the state's economy over $500 million from lost crop production alone. While drought monitoring is critical to Oklahoma's resource managers, it is hampered by a lack of data on a crucial drought indicator: plant available water. Crop yield losses and, by extension, the economic impacts of drought, are strongly linked to plant available water. Plant available water (PAW) is the amount of soil moisture currently in the profile which is available for plant uptake. Some water is held so strongly by the soil that it is not available to plants.The long term goal of the team of collaborators representing Oklahoma State University, the Oklahoma Mesonet, the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, and the University of Oklahoma is to develop the Mesonet as an innovative tool for understanding and managing the water resources of Oklahoma. The objective of this proposal is to bring to completion a first-generation drought monitoring system for Oklahoma based on PAW. The rationale for the proposed research is that providing resource managers with daily data on PAW will enable them to adopt management strategies to mitigate drought impacts. The proposal team is well prepared to succeed with this project due to the extensive expertise and strong achievement records in soil moisture related research, leadership in managing the Oklahoma Mesonet, and experience in the development of online products through the popular websites www.mesonet.org and www.agweather.mesonet.org

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Policy Profiles Vol. 2 No. 4 September 2002

A View of Elementary School Problems in Poor Neighborhoods by Three Elementary School Principalshttps://huskiecommons.lib.niu.edu/ctrgovernment-policyprofiles/1033/thumbnail.jp

Project Report No. 62, Site Index Equations for Loblolly and Slash Pine Plantations in East Texas, Update: Fall 1998

This update utilizes height-age pairs measured from 1982 - 1998. As a result, the number of observations available for analysis is 1,814 loblolly and 788 slash. It is anticipated that the equations in this Fall 1998 update may quantify the productivity of East Texas loblolly and slash pine plantations in a more accurate and reliable manner than the seven previous sets of equations

Coordinating Environmental Genomics and Geochemistry Reveals Metabolic Transitions in a Hot Spring Ecosystem

We have constructed a conceptual model of biogeochemical cycles and metabolic and microbial community shifts within a hot spring ecosystem via coordinated analysis of the “Bison Pool” (BP) Environmental Genome and a complementary contextual geochemical dataset of ∼75 geochemical parameters. 2,321 16S rRNA clones and 470 megabases of environmental sequence data were produced from biofilms at five sites along the outflow of BP, an alkaline hot spring in Sentinel Meadow (Lower Geyser Basin) of Yellowstone National Park. This channel acts as a >22 m gradient of decreasing temperature, increasing dissolved oxygen, and changing availability of biologically important chemical species, such as those containing nitrogen and sulfur. Microbial life at BP transitions from a 92°C chemotrophic streamer biofilm community in the BP source pool to a 56°C phototrophic mat community. We improved automated annotation of the BP environmental genomes using BLAST-based Markov clustering. We have also assigned environmental genome sequences to individual microbial community members by complementing traditional homology-based assignment with nucleotide word-usage algorithms, allowing more than 70% of all reads to be assigned to source organisms. This assignment yields high genome coverage in dominant community members, facilitating reconstruction of nearly complete metabolic profiles and in-depth analysis of the relation between geochemical and metabolic changes along the outflow. We show that changes in environmental conditions and energy availability are associated with dramatic shifts in microbial communities and metabolic function. We have also identified an organism constituting a novel phylum in a metabolic “transition” community, located physically between the chemotroph- and phototroph-dominated sites. The complementary analysis of biogeochemical and environmental genomic data from BP has allowed us to build ecosystem-based conceptual models for this hot spring, reconstructing whole metabolic networks in order to illuminate community roles in shaping and responding to geochemical variability