News

Johnson State College starts wildlife project
Stowe Today
The program is part of a five-year, $850,000 National Science Foundation/Vermont EPSCoR research grant presented to Biology Professor Robert Genter. Workshop participants will venture into the woods, wetlands, and natural areas to collect wildlife scat.

Police nab criminals by their fingerprints--and soon doctors may be able to nab bacteria by their "breathprint."

Researchers at the University of Vermont have been developing technologies that detect disease-causing bacteria in the lung by simply measuring what’s in the breath. The research has potential for creating a fast and easy breath test to detect common infections like tuberculosis.

In January, I reflect by the fire on the year that has passed. It is important to slow down enough to grasp what is happening to our world. The Earth has many timescales. Some are long and slow moving, and they take decades to unfold — like the melting of the Arctic ice cap as greenhouse gases warm the planet.

As the seasons change, we can adapt and try to fit in with what the Earth is telling us. But when powerful storms blow up or wild fires explode, all we can do is try to get out of the way. Sometimes it is too late, because we have ignored warnings and have put buildings in vulnerable places.

The Agency of Natural Resources released a draft report early Friday that puts a price tag on the chasm between the cost of cleaner water and what Vermont might spend on curbing pollution.

To clean up stormwater, farm and sewage pollution that threatens water quality in Lake Champlain and elsewhere, the state would have to increase spending by $156 million a year, the report concludes.

Members of the RACC Team meet to collaborate on progress to date and share plans and strategies for the upcoming year focused around Scientific Question 1 - in lake and to lake processes. The multidisciplinary team includes faculty from UVM, Middlebury College, Saint Michael's College, Johnson State College; graduate students and post-doctoral associates.

The VT EPSCoR Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD) held a Macroinvertebrate Identification Workshop for 13 VT EPSCoR Streams Project participants on Tuesday, December 11 from 10:00am to 2:00pm at Saint Michael’s College. As participants of the Streams Project, the three high school teachers and 10 high school students spent the summer and fall of 2012 collecting macroinvertebrate samples and water samples from streams around Vermont. The workshop was designed to assist participants in the identification of these macroinvertebrates with help from experts like Dr. Declan McCabe (Professor of Biology at Saint Michael’s College), Aaron Moore (VT Department of Environmental Conservation) and Katie Chang (VT EPSCoR CWDD Research Technician). High school teams came from Oxbow High School (Teachers Carl Hildebrandt and Patti Valley, students Sarah Burridge, Rachel Emerson, Madison Smith, Amelia McIntire, Sydney McIntire, Shelby Rosten, Anthony Giesing and Sean Tilitson) and Rock Point School (Teacher Kathy Rossman and her students Rosie Jacobson and Josh Farber). Also present was Elizabeth Mitchell from the ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center.

Lawrence Miller, Secretary of the Vermont Agency of Commerce & Community Development, Presents Three Vermont Students with First‐Ever VT EPSCoR Native American and First Generation Student Scholarships for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)

Secretary Lawrence Miller presented $5,000 scholarships to three Vermont students pursuing careers in STEM areas. The scholarships, offered by the VT EPSCoR Center for Workforce Development and Diversity (CWDD), encourage students from diverse backgrounds to enter STEM careers. The first‐crop of competitive scholarships designed to help defray college expenses were made to students from Franklin and Washington Counties: Katie Bedard, a graduate of Mississquoi Valley Union (MVU) in Swanton, Vermont; Tazney Ryea, also a graduate of MVU; and Alex Ferno, a graduate of Union‐32 High School in Montpelier, Vermont.

RACC Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Associates update each other at their regular bi-monthly group meeting photos

Peter Isles, Andrew Schroth, and Courtney Giles on the RV Melosira with the RACC research platform

NPR (blog)
A View From Doha: The Time To Tackle Climate Change Is Now
NPR (blog)
Asim Zia, blogging from the UN COP 18 in Doha, Qatar, is the author of the forthcoming book Post-Kyoto Climate Governance: Confronting the Politics of Scale, Ideology and Knowledge, to be published by Rutledge Press in February 2013. He is assistant ...

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When you see a small ant heading for the sugarbowl on your kitchen counter, it’s likely Tapinoma sessile, known to myrmecologists everywhere as the Odorous House Ant or, simply, a sugar ant. (Odorous? Give it a squeeze to be sure. Smell like rotten coconuts or over-ripe bananas? Yep, you’ve got yourself Tapinoma sessile.) It won’t bite.

An in depth look at the structural and personal impacts of Hurricane Irene on the state of Vermont and how the storm is linked to the larger patterns of climate change now affecting New England.
Producer, Director, Writer: Micah Fink
Produced by Common Good Productions for The Climate Reality Project
Broadcast: November 2012

The VT EPSCoR Research on Adaptation to Climate Change (RACC) team held a Climate Change Modeling Workshop on Tuesday, November 13 from 8:30 am to 6:00 pm at the Burlington Sheraton.
The workshop focused on the development of regional climate change scenarios drawn from sophisticated regional climate models being devised by researchers at UVM. These down scale climate models will provide our region with the capacity to anticipate precipitation and temperature variation at the level of several square kilometers. A diverse group of stakeholders considered the social, economic, agricultural, environmental and infrastructure implications of the type of changing climate being projected by these regional downscaled models.

Dr. Courtney Giles, postdoctoral research fellow in the Rubenstein School of Natural Resources and the Environment at UVM, presents a review of what RACC researchers and high school teams have been working on during the 2012 field season. Topics include: Missisquoi Bay research and the biogeochemical platform, nutrient and sediment inputs, watershed research, and Streams Project research.

Extreme weather is increasing in the United States and around the world. How is this trend related to climate change?

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co., comments, "The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an (extreme) event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change, because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be."

The incidence of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) has been making headlines due to an alarming increase of cases being reported among athletes and military personnel. This episode focuses on brain injuries affecting military personnel in war zones. Dr. Matt Friedman of the National Center for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and Dr. Tom McAllister of Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital in New Hampshire are exploring the association between PTSD and TBI. Dr. Jom Hammack at the University of Vermont is exploring PTSD on a microscopic level.

Vermont EPSCoR faculty and students are featured in a video which explores the science programs available at Johnson State College.

Elise Huntley shares Prezi; competes at the Genius Olympiad using her CWDD Streams Project research poster and wins bronze medal! http://www.geniusolympiad.org/

The new season of Emerging Science continues with a look at current research into a problem that's increasingly affecting our military personnel: the combined effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

In this preview clip, Matt Friedman, M.D., Ph.D. and Executive Director of the National Center for PTSD in White River Junction, Vt., sheds light on how different regions of the brain are affected by PTSD. U.S. Army Sgt. (Ret.) Andrew Reeves of Nashua, N.H., suffers from PTSD and TBI as a result of his service in Iraq.