David D. Anderson is the recipient of the 2011 Penn State Beaver Outstanding Alumnus Award. The award recognizes Beaver alumni who have distinguished themselves through career achievements as well as campus and community involvement. Beaver Chancellor Gary Keefer presented the award to Anderson at the Jan. 25 dinner meeting of the Penn State Beaver Advisory Board.

The nature of a peculiar cosmic explosion detected on Dec. 25, 2010, remains an intriguing question without a clear answer. The cause of the explosion, a gamma-ray burst that first was detected by NASA's Swift observatory, either was a novel type of supernova located billions of light-years from Earth or an unusual collision much closer to home inside our own galaxy, report astronomers in papers published in the Dec. 1 issue of Nature. "It is nice to find that the universe can still surprise us, after seven years and 600 bursts since Swift was launched," said Michael Siegel, a research associate in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and the lead scientist for Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT). Siegel analyzed the UVOT data as it came down to Penn State's Mission Operations Center from the spacecraft, and he also coordinated Swift's follow-up observations.

The Eberly College of Science at Penn State University, in conjunction with its Forensic Science Program, has established a partnership program with the University of Split in Croatia to expand educational opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and to encourage relationships between the faculties of the two universities. The new partnership will facilitate student exchange programs; faculty exchanges; joint research projects; educational programs in forensic science and other scientific disciplines; faculty development; and the exchange of scientific materials, publications and information.

Galaxy -- an open-source, Web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical and genetic research -- is now available as a cloud computing resource. A team of researchers has developed the new technology, which will help scientists and biomedical researchers to harness such tools as DNA-sequencing and analysis software, as well as storage capacity for large quantities of scientific data.

The public is invited to submit nominees for the Penn State Beaver 2011 Outstanding Alumni Award which will be presented in January at a dinner meeting of the Penn State Beaver Advisory Board and the Penn State Beaver Alumni Society Board of Directors. Eligibility is limited to individuals who have attended Penn State Beaver. The award recognizes campus alumni who have distinguished themselves through professional achievements and/or contributions to society and/or involvement with Beaver campus. To place a nomination for the Beaver Outstanding Alumni Award, visit http://www.beaver.psu.edu/Alumni/32995.htm and submit online or by mail. For more information about the award or nominating process, contact Patterson at dlp25@psu.edu or 724-773-3558.

A unique and innovative analysis of how social media can affect the spread of a disease has been designed and implemented by a scientist at Penn State studying attitudes toward the H1N1 vaccine. Marcel Salathe, an assistant professor of biology, studied how users of Twitter -- a popular microblogging and social-networking service -- expressed their sentiments about a new vaccine. He then tracked how the users' attitudes correlated with vaccination rates and how microbloggers with the same negative or positive feelings seemed to influence others in their social circles. The research is considered the first case study in how social media sites affect and reflect disease networks, and the method is expected to be repeated in the study of other diseases. The results will be published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.