ISO welcomes our new and returning ISO Fellows and Origins majors! We begin the year with over 100 fellows and a dozen majors who are preparing to meet the challenges that Science in the 21st Century promises through engaging in Origins’ broad, interdisciplinary vision and curriculum, which embraces the CWRU College of Arts & Sciences, the School of Medicine, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Ideastream public TV and radio, and other partners. Learn more about majoring in Origins.
ISO Fellow Dr. Darin Croft and colleagues Russell K. Engelman and Federico Anaya have just published a description of some new South American marsupials from middle-Miocene Bolivia, including two new species of Palaeothentes, P. serratus and P. relictus, hailing from approximately 13 million years ago. Engaging in what amounts to a bit of paleo-dentistry, Croft and his colleagues analyze fossil tooth shape and construction in their quest for information regarding the animals’ eating habits, lifestyle, and genetic evolution, and, ultimately, extinction.
In one of the first documented cases of a neutrino experiment coming to visit ISO scientists (instead of the other way around), the ICARUS experiment arrived July 5th in the Port of Cleveland, having set sail from Antwerp, Belgium, aboard the Spliethoff container ship, Frieda. It’s on its way to Fermilab in Batavia, IL, where it will become part of a three-detector suite searching for a hypothesized 4th type of neutrino that interacts only with gravity, which could rewrite physicists’ understanding of the particles making up our universe.
ISO fellow Dr. Nita Sahai is asking tough Origins questions, and has been rallying people from across disciplinary boundaries to answer them. “Where do we come from?” opens her ISO:Origins Science Scholars talk, “The Origins of Life: From Geochemistry to Biochemistry”, “What is our relationship to nature? To the Earth? To the stars? To animals and plants?” For Sahai and her colleagues, the answers are imbedded in the fundamental physical-chemical interactions that got life going, and the answers lead to predicting the origins of cellular life not just on Earth, but on other planets.
A vast fraction of study in evolutionary biology has been focused on the evolution and development of outwardly-expressed survival adaptations: spots, horns, bone structures, and more have received much attention. However, ISO fellow Dr. Jameson Voss and his colleagues believe this may be an incomplete picture of evolution of an organism, and are pushing scientists to think beyond the spots and the feathers and include the microbiome in the constellation of factors driving the evolution of life on Earth.
Join ISO Director and cosmologist, Dr. Glenn Starkman, for an informative escape to exotic Iceland. Explore the culture of Reykjavik, the Great Geysir, glaciers, magnificent waterfalls and ice-caps, enjoy steamy hot springs, world-class spas, magnificent malls, and art museums by day whilst awaiting one of the most spectacular electromagnetic shows nature has to offer, the Aurora Borealis, by night. Trip 1 (Jan 19-23, 2018) is already sold out. Trip 2 (Jan 26-30, 2018) has limited space remaining. Contact Michelle Miller at 216-368-8745 or mlm231@case.edu to sign up.
