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Custom-made protein illustration

Custom-made proteins may help create antibodies to fight HIV

2/27/19

A new way to create proteins that can sneak through HIV’s protective coating may be a step toward understanding the key components needed for developing a vaccine for the virus, according to a team of researchers led by Penn State.

person with image of DNA superimposed

Whose genes are they, anyway?

2/26/19

Personal genomics — decoding your own DNA — offers great promise in tracing your ancestry, learning about your susceptibility to certain diseases, and helping doctors custom-design treatments for you. But it also raises warning flags about privacy and who might profit from your information. If you’re thinking of getting your DNA sequenced, you might want to read this first.

Electricity power lines

Sloan Foundation grant looks at energy market structure for wind integration

2/26/19

Chiara Lo Prete, assistant professor of energy economics in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, was awarded a $250,000 grant for early career researchers from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to examine the effectiveness of energy market structures in aggregating private information on wind production forecasts to better coordinate commitment and production decisions in electric systems.

CO2 sequestration

Coda waves reveal carbon dioxide storage plume

2/26/19

Pumping carbon dioxide into the ground to remove it from the atmosphere is one way to lower greenhouse gases, but keeping track of where that gas is, has been a difficult chore. Now, a team of researchers from Penn State and Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory are using previously ignored seismic waves to pinpoint and track the gas clouds.

inside HPF instrument

Habitable Zone Planet Finder enables discovery of planets around cool stars

2/20/19

A new astronomical spectrograph built by a Penn State-led team of scientists provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby stars, allowing astronomers to detect planets capable of having liquid water on their surfaces that orbit cool stars outside our Solar System.

Greg Filbeck, professor of finance and director of the Black School of Business at Penn State Behrend, and his son Aaron Filbeck, a 2015 Behrend graduate, were two of the co-authors of an upcoming scolarly journal article.

Penn State Behrend's Greg Filbeck and son co-author scholarly journal article

2/20/19

Together, Black School of Business director Greg Filbeck, his son Aaron Filbeck and Xin (Jessica) Zhao, a professor of finance, recently co-authored “Performance Assessment of Firms Following Sustainalytics ESG Principles.” It will be published in the April 2019 issue of The Journal of Investing.

A digital rendering of a global map.

Funding agency investigations emphasize need for researcher disclosures

2/19/19

The U.S. government and federal funding agencies have expressed concern regarding researchers' transparency in disclosing international affiliations. The Office of the Vice President for Research has compiled an online resource to help investigators protect themselves and their research projects.

banded hare-wallaby

Indigenous hunters have positive impacts on food webs in desert Australia

2/17/19

Australia has the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world. Resettlement of indigenous communities resulted in the spread of invasive species, the absence of human-set fires, and a general cascade in the interconnected food web that led to the largest mammalian extinction event ever recorded. In this case, the absence of direct human activity on the landscape may be the cause of the extinctions, according to a Penn State anthropologist.

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