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While most climate scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, implicitly define "pre-industrial" to be in the late 1800's, a true non-industrially influenced baseline is probably further in the past, according to an international team of researchers who are concerned because it affects the available carbon budget for meeting the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit agreed to in the Paris Conference of 2015.

Predicting the weather is a challenge, but predicting who will win the national WxChallenge isn’t nearly as hard. Penn State’s WxChallenge team continues to dominate the 20-week weather forecasting competition, recently earning its sixth straight top finish.

During the civil rights movement, activist groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) used geography and geospatial intelligence to identify protest sites and to plan civil rights protests. A new $373,000 National Science Foundation grant is letting researchers dig into those geospatial tactics to see what can be learned about patterns of racial inequality and how the SNCC collected and leveraged geospatial intelligence data to bolster its activist efforts.

Chuck Pavloski, R&D engineer for earth sciences at the Institute for CyberScience (ICS), will offer a seminar entitled “Big Decision: Choosing Your HPC Resources Wisely” to the Penn State research community. The free seminar will be held from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. August 10 in W203 Millennium Science Complex.

Large, robust, lens-shaped microfossils from the approximately 3.4 billion-year-old Kromberg Formation of the Kaapvaal craton in eastern South Africa are not only among the oldest elaborate microorganisms known, but are also related to other intricate microfossils of the same age found in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, according to an international team of scientists.