Warming global temperatures are changing life on every continent on Earth, including Antarctica, where more microbes are moving in to territory previously covered by ice. How these microbes respond to warming offers us clues about what future Antarctica will look like and who will thrive there. Microbial ecologist and PhD candidate Alicia Purcell from the Center for Ecosystem… Read more
scientists
The tip of the ICEBERG: NAU planetary scientists developing large-scale ‘imagery-computing superhighway’
Scientists are creating ways to compile and interpret an abundance of high-resolution satellite images on a continental scale to better understand Antarctica, Arizona and the world.
The same sophisticated satellite imaging techniques being developed to map and identify the size and composition of uncharted land… Read more
NAU team awarded prestigious Chan Zuckerberg grant to build global community around bioinformatics software
Even as NAU associate professor Greg Caporaso and his team were putting the final touches on their QIIME 2™ paper, published earlier this year, he was already planning several major enhancements to this open source and free bioinformatics software that enables scientists to perform microbiome analysis from increasingly large amounts… Read more
¡MIRA!: NAU establishes new interdisciplinary, inclusive center as transformative model for high-impact materials research and workforce development
One of the biggest and most complex challenges facing Arizona’s institutions of higher education is the need to produce a more interdisciplinary workforce for STEM fields that is inclusive and representative of the state’s diverse populations. A new multicultural research center at Northern Arizona University built on the field of materials science promises… Read more
Collaborating on two major NASA projects, NAU astrobiologist joins in hunt for life outside our solar system
When 51 Pegasi b was the first planet orbiting a Sun-like star discovered outside our solar system in 1995, the question of whether life exists in other corners of our galaxy shifted from, “Do exoplanets exist?” to “How do we recognize whether an exoplanet can support life?”
Since then, NASA’s Kepler mission and ground-based surveys of exoplanets have revealed… Read more