Richard B. Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, will be the first recipient of the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication, Climate One at The Commonwealth Club announced Friday, Aug. 26, during the 2011 Stephen H. Schneider Symposium in Boulder, Colo.

Can other planets harbor life? Do we have company out in the far-flung universe?

Earthlings since Aristotle have pondered these questions. Now, writes James Kasting, a planetary scientist at Penn State, "Astronomers are on the verge of being able to answer [them] observationally."

It's one thing to study the causes and aftermath of this summer's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It's another thing to travel 1,200 miles from central Pennsylvania and wade through a marsh along the Louisiana coast. Which is exactly why Timothy Bralower and Nancy Tuana, the faculty members teaching an honors course at Penn State this fall on the science and ethics behind the spill, hauled 24 students to New Orleans for a week in November to see for themselves what is happening along the coast six months after the country's worst oil spill.

The Soufriere Hills Volcano on Montserrat erupted in 1995, and an international team of researchers has studied this volcano from land and sea since then to understand the workings of andesite volcanos more completely. "To the extent that the Soufriere Hills Volcano is typical of andesitic dome building volcanoes, results from this research can be expected to apply more generally," said Barry Voight, professor emeritus of geosciences, Penn State.

April in central Pennsylvania: Against the brilliant blue sky, the new leaves of oak, maple, and beech shine gold-green. Yellow flowers of cinquefoil and hot-pink blooms of gaywings dot the forest floor. Somewhere higher up in the watershed, a red-bellied woodpecker gives its rattling call.