News

 Plagues of locusts, containing millions of insects, fly across the sky to attack crops, but the individual insects do not collide with each other within these massive swarms. Now a team of engineers is creating a low-power collision detector that mimics the locust avoidance response and could help robots, drones and even self-driving cars avoid collisions.

Christelle Wauthier, associate professor of geosciences in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, received a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation to develop numerical models to characterize volcanic flank instability processes.

Barbara J. Arnold joined the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences as a professor of practice in mining engineering on Aug. 1.

 In a field exercise, geosciences student Katie Reilly moved from point to point, analyzing surface geological formations, hoping to gain insight into the environmental conditions that formed portions of the Rocky Mountains.

Katelyn Kirchner, a doctoral student in materials science and engineering at Penn State, recently earned the Alfred R. Cooper Scholars Award from the American Ceramic Society.

Roman DiBiase won’t soon forget the name of an early mentor when he began his career at Penn State in 2014.

The Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has awarded a combined total of $51.1 million to two university research alliances to counter threats of destruction, with a specific focus on improving current and developing future warfighter technology.

Nita Bharti, Lloyd Huck Early Career Professor and assistant professor of biology at Penn State, and her collaborator Anthony Robinson, associate professor of geography at Penn State, have been awarded seed funding from the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State to study how monitoring the movement of people can potentially be used as a predictor or early indicator of COVID-19 transmission and guide health policy decisions.

A supersensitive dopamine detector can help in the early diagnosis of several disorders that result in too much or too little dopamine, according to a group led by Penn State and including Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and universities in China and Japan.

A new way to treat acid mine drainage (AMD) could help transform the environmental pollution problem into an important domestic source of the critical rare earth elements needed to produce technology ranging from smart phones to fighter jets, according to Penn State scientists.