The aging of star clusters is linked more with their lifestyle than with how old they actually are, according to a new NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope study coauthored by Steinn Sigurdsson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State.

"Our observations of star clusters have shown us that, although they all formed more than 10 billion years ago, some of them are still young at heart," Sigurdsson said. "We now can see how fast the clusters are racing toward their final collapse. It is as if each cluster has its own internal clock, some of which are ticking slower than others." Sigurdsson is a Penn State theorist working in collaboration with the European Research Council's Cosmic-Lab project. The study is published in the current issue of the journal Nature. More information is online at http://bit.ly/VT0Fhe.

The discovery that hundreds of stars are rapidly moving together in long, looping orbits around the center of our galaxy has been announced by a team of scientists including a Penn State astronomer and others collaborating in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III).

"The stars near the nucleus of the Milky Way appear to form a bar-like structure thousands of light years in size," said Donald Schneider, a distinguished professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and coauthor of the study. "In this investigation, we were able to accurately measure the motions of a set of stars located in the galaxy's bar and to gain some insight into the dynamics of the central, dense regions of the Milky Way." Schneider is the survey coordinator and scientific publications coordinator for the SDSS-III.

Brine water that flows back from gas wells in the Marcellus Shale region after hydraulic fracturing is many times more salty than seawater, with high contents of various elements, including radium and barium. The chemistry is consistent with brines formed during the Paleozoic era, a study by an undergraduate student and two professors in Penn State's Department of Geosciences found.

The study indicates that the brine flowback elements found in high levels in the late stages of hydraulic fracturing come from the ancient brines rather than from salts dissolved by the water and chemicals used as part of the fracking process. The paper by Lara O. Haluszczak, a Penn State student who has since graduated; professor emeritus Arthur W. Rose; and Lee R. Kump, professor and head of the Department of Geosciences; detailing those findings has been accepted for publication in Applied Geochemistry, the journal of the International Association of Geochemistry, and is available online.

An invasive grass species may be one reason fires are bigger and more frequent in certain regions of the western United States, according to a team of researchers. Researchers used satellite imagery to identify cheatgrass, a plant species accidentally introduced by settlers in the West during the 1800s, in a disproportionately high number of fires in the Great Basin, a 600,000 square-kilometer arid area in the West that includes large sections of Nevada, as well as parts of Utah, Colorado, Idaho, California and Oregon.

Jenni Evans, professor of meteorology, discussed predicting the track of a hurricane at the Oct. 25, 2012, Research Unplugged event.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars has received an $11.9 million award from the National Science Foundation to support the establishment of a multi-institution research network on Sustainable Climate Risk Management strategies. Part of the NSF's Sustainability Research Networks initiative, the network is centered at Penn State and spans nine additional U.S. universities and research institutes.

Coral migration, like that of other species, is halted by the Eastern Pacific Barrier. A coral species found in abundance from Indonesia eastward to Fiji, Samoa, and the Line Islands rarely crosses the Eastern Pacific Barrier toward the coast of the Americas, according to a team of researchers led by Iliana Baums, assistant professor of biology at Penn State. Charles Darwin hypothesized in 1880 that most species could not disperse across the marine barrier, and Baums's study is the first comprehensive test of that hypothesis using coral. Her findings have important environmental and economic implications.

A free mobile app developed by Penn State researchers can help dairy farmers plow through financial planning by helping them track feed costs and income. The DairyCents app, currently available on the Apple iPhone, helps farmers estimate income over feed cost per cow, a number that tells farmers how much money is left over to pay other expenses minus the feed costs, according to Virginia Ishler, nutrient management specialist and dairy complex manager in animal science. Another function compares feed prices in several locations across the country.