The interplay of politics and religion may shape a person's response to issues even when prominent public figures, like Pope Francis of the Roman Catholic Church, serve as advocates, according to researchers.
Small gestures of kindness by employers can have big impacts on employees’ health and work performance, according to an international team of researchers. The team specifically examined the effects of employers enhancing the lunches of bus drivers in China with fresh fruit and found that it reduced depression among the drivers and increased their confidence in their own work performance.
In her new book — titled “Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump,” which publish on Sept. 10 — Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar, clinical professor of law and director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Penn State, uses case studies and personal interviews to illustrate her analysis of the current administration’s immigration policy. The book includes a level of legal detail that is unavailable in traditional news accounts, in a way that is accessible to an informed but not expert audience.
A team of Penn State College of Education faculty led by P. Karen Murphy has won a five-year, $1.98 million grant from the National Science Foundation to improve the preparation of undergraduate preservice elementary teachers.
Every year, motor vehicle crashes caused by distracted driving kill thousands of people, injure hundreds of thousands and cost billions of dollars; and yet many drivers continue to text and drive, even though they know it’s dangerous. Now, a new study from researchers at Penn State Hazleton and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that video-based “threat appeals” reduced the impulsive decision-making associated with texting and driving and may be a promising strategy in the future.
Karen Murphy, distinguished professor of education (educational psychology) at Penn State, and a multi-university/institute team has won a Lyle Spencer Research Award to Transform Education. The award is for just shy of $1 million.
Since 2000, school district secessions in the South have increasingly sorted white and black students, and white and Hispanic students, into separate school systems, weakening the potential to improve school integration, according to a new study published today (Sept. 4) in AERA Open, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
A new method for exploring natural gas in the Marcellus Shale shows potential high yield areas can be found more easily and with lower costs. Traditionally, natural gas hot spots are determined using a combination of current well production data and various geological tests. Penn State researchers, in work published in the SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering journal, detail a method for approximating available gas in untapped areas using well production data taken from more than 5,600 existing wells.
A team of researchers at Penn State has been awarded $300,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop a curriculum and educational tools to improve prototyping communications at the undergraduate level.
Religious communities may provide an important social support community for international college students in the United States, according to researchers at Penn State. Specifically, the team found that religious communities also may help to provide culturally sensitive counseling to international students. The team focused its investigation on Chinese international students.
Humans and machines worked together to help train an artificial intelligence model to outperform other clickbait detectors, according to researchers. The new AI-based solution was also able to tell the difference between clickbait headlines that were generated by machines — or bots — and ones written by people.
In 2016, researchers in the Afar region of Ethiopia discovered a nearly complete cranium of an early human ancestor, Australopithecus anamensis, that dates to 3.8 million years ago. According to the international team of researchers, that fossil revealed that A. anamensis and Australopithecus afarensis coexisted for about 100,000 years rather than at separate time periods as previously thought. The digital reconstruction of the fossil that facilitated its analysis was initiated at Penn State.
In 2018, Penn State and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia launched the Joint Collaboration Development Program, a jointly financed seed-fund program with the aim to collaborate on research projects. The first round of seed funding saw 23 projects funded. The two institutions have committed these seed funds for a second year, around the intersection of health and the environment.
Amara Solari, associate professor of art history, has received a significant grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of a research project titled “Maya Christian Murals of Yucatán: Indigenous Catholicism in Early Modern New Spain.”
Jivaka.net — the recently-released project of C. Pierce Salguero, associate professor of Asian history and religious studies at Penn State Abington — is the product of a years-long survey of Buddhist temples and centers located in the Philadelphia area. Much of the research legwork for the site was completed by undergraduate students working with Salguero.
Penn State Professor of Geosciences Klaus Keller's research group seeks to bring scientific research and communities to develop effective and affordable solutions to the effects of increasing worldwide climate change. Watch a video showcasing Keller's approach.
