CUR Engineering Division Announces 2021 Mentoring Awardees, Student Video Competition Winners

The Engineering Division of the Council on Undergraduate Research announces the 2021 recipients of its Mentoring Awards and winners of its Student Video Competition.

Interactions Within Larger Social Groups Can Cause Tipping Points in Contagion Flow

Contagion processes, such as opinion formation or disease spread, can reach a tipping point, where the contagion either rapidly spreads or dies out. When modeling these processes, it is difficult to capture this complex transition. In the journal Chaos, researchers studied the parameters of these transitions by including three-person group interactions in a contagion model called the susceptible-infected-susceptible model. In this model, an infected person who recovers from an infection can be reinfected.

Global Cooling After Nuclear War Would Harm Ocean Life

A nuclear war that cooled Earth could worsen the impact of ocean acidification on corals, clams, oysters and other marine life with shells or skeletons, according to the first study of its kind.

Mega-Cloud from Canadian Wildfires Will Help Model Impacts of Nuclear War

Extreme wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, pumped so much smoke into the upper atmosphere in August 2017 that an enormous cloud circled most of the Northern Hemisphere – a finding in the journal Science that will help scientists model the climate impacts of nuclear war. The pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) cloud – the largest of its kind ever observed – was quickly dubbed “the mother of all pyroCbs.”

Heather J. Lynch, PhD

Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Announces 2019 National Laureates

An ecologist from Stony Brook University, a theoretical physicist from University of Colorado Boulder and a chemical biologist from Harvard University Three female scientists have been named Laureates of the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, each receiving $250,000, the…