Thomas Detre Professor & Chair of Neurobiology and Center for Neuroscience Co-Director Peter Strick were recently interviewed for Science News. The article titled “The heart plays a hidden role in our mental health” explains that while the brain talks to the heart, the heart talks back and affects our mental health more than scientists originally thought.
When I heard about the project—since named HeritageRoots—and its goal of collecting and compiling indigenous narratives into a virtual experience, I was intrigued by its ambition. As a writing major, I saw the opportunity to study and adapt indigenous traditional knowledge as not only important work for cultural preservation, but a fascinating source of new knowledge to inform my own cultural understanding and writing.
When you think of climate change and saving Earth from more disastrous consequences, you likely think of the melting of ice caps, or endangered animals. You probably aren’t thinking about endangered languages and cultures.
What do virtual reality, archiving, disappearing languages and indigenous cultures have in common? The Computing Technologies for Cultural Preservation capstone course that was just launched this past spring semester.
Charles Jones, a teaching professor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science in the Dietrich School was recently featured in a WESA article. The article, “How ancestral rivers carved up — and flattened — Pittsburgh” talks about how the hills, valleys, and rivers of Pittsburgh have shaped the landscape of the city.
A research team at Pitt led by Alexander Star, a chemistry professor in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has developed a fentanyl sensor that is six orders of magnitude more sensitive than any electrochemical sensor for the drug reported in the past five years. The portable sensor can also tell the difference between fentanyl and other opioids.
David Waldeck, a professor in the Department of Chemistry in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences along with researchers from the University of North Carolina were published in
Undergraduate students with the Department of Mathematics in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the University Library System at Pitt have launched a new peer-reviewed open-access journal, the Pittsburgh Interdisciplinary Mathematics Review (PIMR).
Physics has long suffered from the perception that the most cutting-edge work is done by lone geniuses, usually white men. It’s a bias that’s seeped into how instructors interact with their students, and even into how students think about themselves. Prior research has shown that female students who get A’s in introductory physics think they’re as good at physics as male students who get C’s.
The GRFP is a prestigious program that supports outstanding graduate students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in more than 100 NSF-supported STEM fields. NSF selects a pool of about 2,000 fellowships from 14,000 applicants. These fellowships serve as three years of financial support that can be used over a five-year period at accredited U.S. institutions, including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost-of-education allowance of $12,000 that graduate institutions agree to accept in lieu of charging tuition and fees.
