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The editors of the Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB) have chosen Assistant Professor of Biology Cynthia Downs’ paper “Flea fitness is reduced by high fractional concentrations of CO2 that simulate levels found in their hosts’ burrows” as the Editors’ Choice for its December issue. The paper is featured in the Inside JEB section of the publication, titled “Fleas Don’t Cope in Burrowing Host’s Stale Air.” 

Professor of Geosciences Cynthia Domack and students in Geoscience 390 - Advanced Paleontology: Special Topics in Paleobiology and the Fossil Record visited Little Falls, N.Y., on Oct. 13 to collect fossils.

The Slocan Narrows Archaeological Project, directed by Associate Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale and Visiting Instructor of Anthropology Alissa Nauman, was featured in a photograph on the September cover of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) publication The SAA Archaeological Record. Pictured on the is the excavation at a 2,600-year-old pithouse at the project site located in southeastern British Columbia with field school students Anna Arnn ’17, Mariah Walzer ’17 and Michael Graeme (Selkirk College/University of Victoria).  

Elisabeth MacColl ’16 is on a career path that fortuitously started with a Cellular Neurobiology class she took at Hamilton with Professor of Biology Herm Lehman. The latest outcome is her publication of a paper in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. The paper, “Matrix Metalloproteinases as Regulators of Vein Structure and Function Implications in Chronic Venous Disease,” was written by MacColl and the PI Dr. Raouf A. Khalil of Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

Few people have trouble visually distinguishing a desk chair from a moving car, or the sounds of a crying baby and crashing waves. But could brain activity alone allow researchers to determine what novel stimuli a participant heard or saw? Although the proposition sounds more akin to a science-fiction blockbuster than a scientific possibility, Jack Gallant, of the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley, has spent decades focused on answering this question.

This summer, Lillia McEnaney ’17 split her time excavating a Greek island and making three-dimensional models of stone inscriptions in Macedonia.  McEnaney was a field volunteer at Despotiko, a late archaic to early classical sanctuary to the Greek God Apollo in the middle of the Cycladic islands. She then participated in a field school at a Balkan Heritage Foundation course in Macedonia.

As many who have tried computer coding know, the introductory languages used in the field can often be difficult to approach and unintuitive. It is with this in mind that Eric Collins ’17 and Alex Dennis ’18 with Associate Professor of Computer Science Alistair Campbell, are this summer creating a new programming language called CSPy geared specifically toward beginners.

Patrick Reynolds, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty, announced the appointment of new faculty for the 2015-16 academic year, including five tenure-track appointments, 24 visiting professors and instructors, and two teaching fellows. New tenure-track appointments are Catherine Beck, geosciences; Farah Dawood, chemistry; Cynthia Downs, biology; Quincy Newell, religious studies; and Javier Pereira, economics.

Steven Laurent Cunden ’18 is this summer helping to further develop the robotics technologies used in the Physics 245 course, Electronics and Computers. Cunden is working with the class instructor, Associate Professor of Physics Brian Collet, on enabling the relatively simplistic robotic arms used in the course to receive and react to positional feedback.

When people recall what they enjoyed most about science classes – whether  in college, high school or even earlier – chances are they remember hands-on experiments and the excitement of discovering something new for themselves. This element of discovery is important to Thomas Hoffman ’16 and Adam Lark, director of physics laboratories. The two are working together to add more discovery-based elements to introductory physics labs on campus, hoping to improve the learning experience for physics students.