News

From a boy peering into a garden pond in Ireland to a biology professor wading in the rivers of Vermont, Declan McCabe has always looked deep for answers.

Holding a magnifying glass, the youngest son of Martin and Edna McCabe's six children spent hours staring at the frogs and worms in the garden pond. Living in the semi-rural outskirts of Athlone in central Ireland, Declan McCabe would ask "Who made the trees? Why is the grass green?" Taught to fish by his father, who loved the nearby river, he would spend all day catching fish and then returning them to water.

Part of the mission of Vermont EPSCoR, through its Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD), is to train upcoming young scholars who are now undergraduate students in scientific fields in which RACC works. Each summer, a group of interns joins the team and pursues a range of projects. As part of that effort, the students, either in teams or individually, and with mentoring from current RACC faculty, postdocs, and graduate students, select, design, and execute their own research projects. These projects are designed around RACC research goals, either directly supporting the work of fulltime RACC researchers or pursuing complementary research questions which would otherwise go unaddressed.

A parking lot at UVM is a lab for stormwater, freeze-thaw challenges
BurlingtonFreePress.com
University of Vermont professor Mandar Dewoolkar explains Friday how rainfall from an asphalt portion of a Trinity Campus parking lot flows into porous concrete slabs — and into the water table. / JOEL BANNER BAIRD/FREE PRESS ...

Video produced by the Gund Institute. Asim Zia talkes about Research on Adaptation to Climate Change in the Lake Champlain Basin.

Video: WFFF TV in Burlington VT. extended report on the new NEWRnet NSF grant.

Video: WFFF TV in Burlington VT reports on the new NEWRnet NSF grant.

North Country Public Radio
'The pulse of the watershed'
BurlingtonFreePress.com
“You can liken it to taking the pulse of the watershed,” UVM assistant professor of geology Andrew Schroth, one of about 20 researchers involved in the project, said in a statement. The new data might also be used to measure perceptions and behaviors ...
Vt., RI and Del. To study watershed changesWLNE-TV (ABC6)

all 11 news articles »

Two professors at St. Michael's Collegeare part of a research team that has won a $2 million grant to study DNA technology.

Mathematics professor Joanna Ellis-Monaghan and computerscience professor Greta Pangborn will be working with 10 experts on a project from the National Science Foundation to develop "self-replicating nanoscale origami."

The project will look for ways to select and identify useful DNA configurations, copying them to produce more, and evolving the configurations over successive generations to produce the best features.

Ellis-Monaghan and Pangborn will be working closely with each of the labs to develop mathematical problem formulations for the various processes.

New Sensors to Take Pulse of Watershed
UVM News
... high-frequency data for use by those who manage the Lake Champlain Basin and watersheds in Rhode Island and Delaware will be of broad interest beyond our states,” says Judith Van Houten, director of Vermont EPSCoR and UVM professor of biology, ...

Program Gives Students Chance To Rehearse For Life
Vermont Public Radio
And one of those opportunities is called the Governor's Institutes of Vermont. The Governor's Institutes are finishing their 30th summer of programs this week. Karen Taylor Mitchell is the program's executive director. She spoke with Vermont Edition ...

Google News

Part of the earth's largest surface freshwater system, Lake Erie is a vital source of drinking water for 11 million people. Researchers Anna Michalak, Tom Bridgeman, and Pete Richards are studying how farming practices and severe weather can increase the amount of fertilizer-derived nutrients in the water, which diminishes water quality and threatens the lake's ecosystem and the public's health.

Panel has many Fukushima questions
Barre Montpelier Times Argus
Leslie Kanat, a professor of geology at Johnson State College and a panel member, had questions about the dry cask facility, which is just north of the Vermont Yankee building. Entergy Nuclear engineer Bill Buteau said the dry cask facility had been ...

Google News

vtdigger.org
Facing climate change: Jet stream instability causes record rainfall, summer ...
vtdigger.org
“If you go back 30 or 40 years, we had weather patterns where, typically, our fronts would pass us every five days or so and there would be a strong flow from west to east,” said Alan Betts, an independent climate researcher based out of Pittsford who ...

and more »

The last two months of heavy rains have pushed Lake Champlain to near flood stage, and aggravated the lake’s pollution problems.

The high water and increased pollution comes as federal and state officials are preparing a clean up plan for the lake.

The plan will likely include everything from new limits on sewage treatment plants to increased controls on storm water.

Numerous changes in global and regional climates have been observed, documented and studied from the viewpoints of various sciences and at different scales (IPCC, 2007). On the one hand, changes in global, and, especially, regional, climate represent the triggering factor of alterations in ecosystems and in the environment of those regions, affecting people's welfare as well. On the other hand, changes of regional economic relationships, economic growth or decay, can diminish or accentuate negative impact on the environment and quality of life. Thus, it might be difficult to find the determinant factor for the changes at the regional level in certain economic contexts. Here, multidisciplinary and complex approaches would give better results.

FlowCAM takes pictures of individual organisms down to 2 microns and up to 2 mm. RACC interns build up digital image libraries and use automated statistical models to classify organisms in images. It is being used by RACC Question 1 to count phytoplankton cells and zooplankton from Missisquoi Bay. Flowcam can process 20 to 30 samples per day vs 3 or 4 by microscope.

Rapid identification of lung infection by analysing volatile compounds in breath
MTBeurope
Co-author of the paper, publishd in IOP Publishing's Journal of Breath Research, Jane Hill, from the University of Vermont, said: “Traditional methods employed to diagnose bacterial infections of the lung require the collection of a sample that is then ...

Google News

Twenty high school teams from around Vermont and Puerto Rico participated in the 2013 High School Program training week at Saint Michael's college from June 24-28th. We learned about watershed ecology, Vermont's climate, and how the Lake Champlain Basin is adapting to a changing climate
Additional photos from the 2013 High School Training Week can be found on the CWDD Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/VermontEPSCoRCwdd

Keeping Nutrients Out Of Our Waterways
Vermont Public Radio
Vermont's Ecosystem Restoration Manager Kari Dolan and UVM Professor of Water Resources Suzanne Levine discuss the science of nutrient runoff and the efforts by the state to contain them. Post your questions or comments about efforts to keep nutrients ...