Posts tagged science
Leading quantitative conservation biologist named CU’s first Colorado Chair in Environmental Studies
Oct 1st
The endowed chair in environmental studies was made possible by $4 million in gifts made anonymously in 2009 and 2010 toward the chair.
Sharon Collinge, professor and director of the CU-Boulder Environmental Studies Program, called Doak a perfect match. “He epitomizes what we’re looking for,” she said.
Doak is especially skilled in interdisciplinary research, she said. He brings expertise in policy to his analyses of risks of energy development, for example. And he is widely cited for his research in quantitative conservation biology, which combines sophisticated computer modeling with varying policy scenarios to project changes in populations of rare species.
For instance, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science recently published a study co-authored by Doak concluding that the California condor is chronically endangered by lead exposure from hunters’ spent ammunition.
While the free-flying condor population has risen in the last three decades, that increase has been achieved through captive breeding, monitoring and veterinary care, the study found. Meanwhile, the primary threat to the endangered bird — lead poisoning from bullets and shotgun shells lodged in carrion — has gone largely unmitigated, the study said.
Doak and his fellow researchers found no evidence that California’s 2008 partial ban on lead ammunition yielded any decrease in lead exposure and poisoning in condors.
Since 2007, Doak has served as a professor of zoology and physiology at the University of Wyoming. Previously, he was a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, California Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Scholarly papers have cited his work more than 3,000 times since 1998.
Doak said he was drawn to CU-Boulder’s Environmental Studies Program because of its breadth, spanning disciplines ranging from biogeochemistry to political science to philosophy. This interdisciplinary focus is necessary to confront some of the world’s most intractable problems, Doak and Collinge said.
“That’s the only way we can really address and resolve some of the major environmental challenges that we face,” Collinge said.
Working with experts from a wide range of disciplines, Doak added, provides a motivation and opportunity “not once a year but every day to confront your own ignorance and thus to appreciate and learn new ideas and approaches.”
It is not that interdisciplinary work is always best, he added. “We need to train ourselves and our students to determine when the problem we are confronting requires an interdisciplinary approach. If you want to build a bridge that won’t fall down, you don’t need an interdisciplinary team. You need a good engineer.”
The critical question, he said, is the following: “Is this problem a nail that requires a hammer, or is this a problem that requires a lot of tools? And most environmental problems require an entire chest of tools and the different people who know how to use them.”
Collinge said students sometimes grasp this distinction better than professors do. “Students who are interested in the environment understand very deeply that they have to know something about politics and policies and how we make choices and why we make choices,” she said. “They’ve essentially pushed us, encouraged us to provide that broad and deep training for them.”
Of the donor’s gift, Collinge said, “This was incredibly generous. And we are really grateful.
“For me, it validates or speaks to the importance of what we’re doing,” she said. “With more than 1,000 undergraduate majors in environmental studies and 50 graduate students, enthusiasm was abundant even before the gift that enabled the endowed chair.”
22 Boom – Best in Boulder and Welcome Back C.U. – Episode 57
Sep 12th
This is a single show broken up into 3 sections that include our 2012 Best of Boulder series, the 2012 Fall Welcome Back C.U. favorites, and our traditional 22 Boom videos with cooking, science, news and more.
Videos in this Episode
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22 Boom Intro -
Best of Boulder Intro -
Snarf’s Sub Shop -
Apollo Ink Printing -
Colorado Landmark -
2012 Best of Boulder TV Breaker -
Ripple Pure Frozen Yogurt -
Jalino’s Pizza Boulder -
Art Cleaners in Basemar Shopping Center -
2012 Welcome Back C.U. Breaker -
Subway Boulder – UMC at the C.U. Campus -
D.P. Dough Boulder -
Boulder Army Store Fall fashions and Winter Wear -
Denny’s in Boulder -
Aspen Tan -
Boulder Toyota 2012 Scion FRS and Scion iQ -
Pedal to Properties -
22 Boom Breaker -
Hotshots Movie Reviews of Hit and Run -
Jann Scott Live – North Pole -
Sky Guy – Dispatch – Apollo 11 -
Gorgeous Food with Jena – Summer Health Dip -
World News 1 – Predictions -
Redneck TV – Chili, Cars and Bluegrass -
Outro
CU led mission to study past climate on Mars enters final phase before slated 2013 launch
Sep 11th
The mission, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere And Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, passed the critical agency milestone known as Key Decision Point-D, or KDP-D on Monday, said NASA officials. The key decision meeting moving MAVEN forward was held at NASA Headquarters in Washington and was chaired by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“The spacecraft and instruments are all coming together at this point,” said CU-Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky, the MAVEN principal investigator and associate director for science at the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP. “Although we’re focused on getting everything ready for launch right now, we aren’t losing sight of our ultimate objective — getting to Mars and making the science measurements.”
NASA’s $670 million MAVEN mission will be the first devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. Clues on the Martian surface, including features resembling dry lakes and riverbeds as well as minerals that form only in the presence of water, suggest that Mars once had a denser atmosphere that supported liquid water on the surface, Jakosky said.
“I’m incredibly proud of how this team continues to meet every major milestone on schedule on its journey to Mars,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Being ready for the start of system level integration and test is critically important to ultimately being ready for launch on November 18, 2013.”
KDP-D occurs after the project has completed a series of independent reviews that cover not only technical health of the project but also programmatic health, including schedule and cost. KDP-D represents the official transition from the Phase C development stage to Phase D in the mission life cycle. During Phase D, the spacecraft bus is completed, the science instruments are integrated into the spacecraft, spacecraft testing occurs and the MAVEN mission launches late in 2013.
The huge amount of public interest in NASA’s Curiosity Rover, which landed on Mars Aug. 6 and is currently being driven remotely around the planet, is no surprise to Jakosky. “Mars has a lot of similarities to Earth,” he said. “It’s the closest planet, it has similar day lengths, and it has an atmosphere, weather and geologic processes similar to those on our own planet.
“But the real kicker is the potential for life,” said Jakosky, who also directs the Center for Astrobiology at the University of Colorado. “Because of that, I think Mars has always held a special place in the hearts and minds of the public.”
Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department, cautioned that there is much more work to be done before launch. “This decision by NASA marks the start of integration of all of the instruments on the spacecraft. It’s cool to see the spacecraft coming together, but there is a lot of work still to go and a lot of challenges to solve between now and when the spacecraft is ready for launch.”
The next major review for the MAVEN team is the Mission Operations Review in November 2012. This review assesses the project’s operational readiness and its progress towards launch. The project will continue to work with partners to deliver all instruments in the next four months.
“CU-Boulder’s participation in Mars exploration missions goes back decades, beginning with NASA’s Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 missions launched in 1969,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “LASP is a proven training ground for students seeking hands-on experience in building, testing and flying space hardware and is the only institute in the world to have designed and built instruments that have been launched to every planet in the solar system.”
The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California at Berkeley with some instrument elements from CU’s LASP and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., contains six instruments that will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet.
The Remote Sensing Package built by LASP will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, while The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by NASA Goddard, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutrals and ions.
MAVEN will launch during a 20-day period in November-December 2013. It will go into orbit around Mars in September 2014, and, after a one-month checkout period, will make measurements from orbit for one Earth year.
In addition to leading the mission and providing instrumentation, CU-Boulder will provide science operations and direct education and public outreach efforts. NASA’s Goddard manages the project. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., is building the spacecraft and will perform mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena provides program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists from CU-Boulder heading instrument teams — Nick Schneider, Frank Eparvier and Robert Ergun — as well as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers and mission operations specialists.
MAVEN will include participation by a number of CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years. Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects at LASP, which provides hands-on training for future careers as engineers and scientists, said Jakosky.
For more information about MAVEN visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/ and www.nasa.gov/maven. For more information on LASP visithttp://lasp.colorado.edu/home/.