What ASU did on your summer vacation
Ah, summer. Barbecues, road trips, paperback reading. While students departed for roughly 10 weeks of summer quietude, ASU logged groundbreaking research, introduced local children to the medical field, and discovered a hole in the moon.
A carnivorous sponge, edible yam and flat-faced frogfish were among the top 10 new species of 2010, unveiled at the end of May by an international team of taxonomists and the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU. “Charting the species of the world and their unique attributes are essential parts of understanding the history of life,” said Quentin Wheeler, entomologist and director of the institute.
ASU President Michael Crow helped position Arizona to be a top leader in renewable energy with a signing ceremony at the ASU Research Park for a new tax incentive bill, HB 2370.
Sustainability advancement also came in the form of an awarded $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to tackle key hurdles in the commercialization of algae-based biofuels.
And ASU ecologist James Elser asked the public to take a long, hard look at the sustainability of our current phosphorus use in the July-August issue of American Scientist. “We have colleagues here working on bioengineering approaches that could help plants be better at exploring the soil, better at acidifying the soil and better at grabbing phosphorus,” Elser said.
While it may seem like the stuff of fables, scientists did, indeed, discover a hole in the Moon. New photographs of the Moon, courtesy of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) at ASU, reveal the most detailed views yet of a rare hole in the lunar surface – a pit large enough to swallow an entire football field whole.
Other space discoveries included a rare rock on Mars when ASU's Mars Space Flight Facility found an outcrop of rock rich in carbonate minerals.
But that’s not all. The Mars Space Flight Facility also made available online the best map of the Red Planet ever assembled, and then invited citizen scientists to help make it even better.
He is one of the most famous Sun Devil football players in history, and this summer the late Pat Tillman became the 9th Sun Devil to be selected to the College Football Hall of Fame.
“Campus” became “camp” for the Valley’s youngest Sun Devils. Here, elementary school students learned about optical illusions as part of the “Science is All about Me & What I Can Be” summer program, which focuses on six- to 12-year-old students and is a collaboration between the Arizona Science Center and Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at the Polytechnic campus.
And more than 50 Arizona high school students took a stab at suturing during a three-day medical camp.
The NCAA’s annual Academic Progress Rates announcement confirmed ASU’s decade-long upward trajectory in academic performance. ASU’s average score of 974 ranks second in the Pacific-10 Conference, behind Stanford.
ASU led a forum at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., on how to fix American education so that teaching careers carry more prestige, innovation is encouraged in the classroom, and technology is in the hands of educators.
To further this goal of enhancing American education, two ASU scientists are part of a core team of researchers awarded $20 million to improve listening and reading comprehension in preschool through third grade. Many American students do not understand what they read well enough to support their success in school, work and society, according to research conducted by the U.S. Department of Education.
Students traveling abroad this summer were kind enough to write back home about their adventures overseas. Kitt Keller, a creative writing major, studied in London, Dublin and Edinburgh.
Jason Loose, a sustainability and Chinese major, learned about rural education in China, the problems it faces, and how it compares to education in China’s urban areas and the United States.
Back in Arizona, we got to learn more about the ecology of Tempe Town Lake after the lake’s inflatable dams burst July 20 and drained an estimated 750 million gallons of water from the lake. ASU researcher Nancy Grimm says key scientific questions surrounding sediment, ecological systems and lake management can be considered in a new light.
Got text? The inaugural summer of the “rl txt” young writers’ institute, sponsored by the Central Arizona Writing Project, proved that young people do have “text” in the form of real writing to share with the world.