Rock Hunting—in the Antarctic?
One of Abreu's colleagues shows off a meteorite the team found.
A Penn State DuBois faculty member is down in the Antarctic right now, spending six weeks as part of a team of researchers collecting rocks. Well, OK, not just rocks—meteorites.
Neyda Abreu, who teaches math and geology at DuBois, is part of a project called ANSMET, which stands for the Antarctic Search for Meteorites. She posted a blog entry today in which she describes what it’s like to bop around the Antarctic icesheet on snowmobiles.
(If the link above takes you to someone else’s blog entry, just look for the Dec. 27th posting called “The Ski-Doo People.”)
The ANSMET project has been going on for more than three decades: It started in 1976 and currently is led by a guy named Ralph Harvey, who is a professor at Case Western Reserve University.
Some of the meteorologists the team finds are a little, uh, small.
Apparently Antarctica is a great place to collect meteorites, “the premier place on this planet,” according to the ANSMET Web site:
Meteorites don’t fall preferentially on Antarctica—they fall randomly all over the globe, and Antarctica is just an easy place to find them. One of the more obvious reasons is that it’s the perfect place to look for anything falling from the sky, an immense white and blue sheet. Essentially, if you go out onto the icesheet, where the nearest rock is 3,000 meters straight down, any rock you find on the surface almost certainly fell there from outer space.
Collecting those meteorites can help scientists understand more about the origins and nature of our solar system, as they explain on the ANSMET Web site.
The eight researchers on this year’s ANSMET team come from seven different institutions, including Penn State, the University of Colorado, and NASA, among others. Team members post a blog entry just about every day.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 27, 2009
Paterno Antsy for Big Ten Expansion
A friend called my attention to a story in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune about the recent talk of expanding the Big Ten. Joe Paterno has told ESPN (again) that he’d love to see a Big East team join the Big Ten, and he mentioned Rutgers, Pitt, Syracuse, “even Connecticut.” Having a 12th team would pave the way for a Big Ten championship game, which would keep the league in people’s minds a little longer each fall.
“Right now we play—and then we sit and watch,” the paper quotes Paterno as saying. “We were through (with the regular season) Nov. 21st.”
It’s not the first time Paterno has made his views on the subject known; last April, when he was in New York City for one of the Alumni Association’s “An Evening with Joe” events, he told ESPN pretty much the same thing.
It also brings to mind this item from our senior editor Ryan Jones, writing last March about Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese’s regret that that conference didn’t add Penn State back in 1982. Penn State was an independent at the time, and the Big East came within one vote of inviting the University to join. Interesting to think about how things might be different today if that vote had turned out differently.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 26, 2009
Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens
I took the day off yesterday and made a round-trip visit to Philadelphia—not to do Christmas shopping, which is what many normal people would be doing on Dec. 22, but to do some photography. I figured that the recent snowstorm (Philly got about two feet last weekend) combined with a forecast for sunny skies would create some nice possibilities.
At the suggestion of a colleague at the Palmer Museum of Art, Dana Carlisle Kletchka, I included a stop at a place called Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, on South Street. It’s kind of an indoor/outdoor art installation made up of the amazing work of mosaic artist Isaiah Zagar. Better yet, the executive director of Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens is a Penn Stater: Ellen Owens ’04, who has degrees in both art and art education from the University. We might have to profile her in the magazine sometime—seems like she has a pretty cool job.
The Magic Gardens are indeed a lot of fun to photograph—funky and colorful, with great opportunities for wide-angle shots as well as close-ups of little details in the mosaics. Just a great treat for the eyes. Included here are three of the photos I took yesterday. Click on them to see them bigger.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 23, 2009
The Sight of Spring
With the January/February 2010 issue at the printer, we’re already thinking about our March/April magazine. We’ll be bringing the welcome sight of Spring to your door with a feature on George Griffith ’56 and his striking water lilies and lotus flowers. Griffith has been one of the early financial supporters of the Arboretum at Penn State and has also donated some of his water lilies to a pond at the Arboretum.
Back in August we sent Pittsburgh photographer Scott Goldsmith to shoot the gardens surrounding Griffith’s home in Ligonier, Pa. It’s clear that Goldsmith was very inspired by what he found blooming in the 32 ponds scattered on Griffith’s 60-acre farm. The images are too beautiful to keep them to ourselves, so with 6 inches of snow on the ground and Spring feeling a long way away, it’s the perfect time for a sneak preview. Here’s a little shot of color for these white-washed winter days….
(sigh.)
Carole Otypka, art director
Add comment December 22, 2009
Looks Like We Picked a Timely Cover
About six months ago, we were looking at some magazine’s “summer reading list” (I no longer remember which magazine), and our art director said, “What about a winter reading list?”
We got to talking, and decided it would be fun to find a collection of Penn State faculty members who happened to be avid readers and ask them to recommend some good books for cold winter’s nights.
The result should be arriving in your mailboxes in the next week or so, depending on where you live—and assuming, of course, that you’re an Alumni Association member.
The cover illustration, for which we hired a European illustrator named Andy Ward, shows some avid readers hanging out in the snow, engrossed in their books. The snowy cover seems especially appropriate in light of the blizzard that hit the mid-Atlantic states over the weekend. In fact, our printer is based in Strasburg, Va., an area that got a foot and a half of snow—and people in Virginia are not accustomed to getting that much snow. The storm set the printing of the magazine back by about 24 hours, so our Jan-Feb issue is now scheduled to be in the mail on Wednesday instead of tomorrow.
Check back with us after the first of the year—there’s talk that members of the magazine staff will be offering up their top picks for winter reading. In the meantime you can read a short bio of illustrator Andy Ward here and see some other examples of his unusual work here.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 21, 2009
Women’s Volleyball: This Photo Says it All
Mike Carlson, shooting for the Associated Press, got this image last night of the Penn State women’s volleyball team celebrating its third straight national championship.
It was an amazing come-from-behind win: The top-ranked Nittany Lions lost the first two sets of their match with second-ranked Texas and were on the brink of seeing their 101-match unbeaten streak—not to mention their dreams of a threepeat—come to a sudden end. But they came back to win the next two sets to even the match, then won a dramatic, back-and-forth fifth set for the title.
ESPN.com has some stories and a good video recap. Be sure to check out the fan in the video who’s standing behind Karch Kiraly and Beth Mowins, wearing a Joe Paterno mask and holding up three fingers to celebrate the threepeat. (I have no idea who he is, but I like his enthusiasm.)
But my favorite part of the video is at the very end, when Megan Hodge slams home the championship point and the players on the sideline rush the court and slide into the pile. If anyone knows of a video clip that shows more of that, let me know—I could watch that moment 50 times and not get tired of it.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 20, 2009
The Arboretum Gets a Christmas Look
Since a fountain is a little impractical in the wintertime, the folks at the Arboretum at Penn State have installed some Christmas trees in their fountain—and some lights to illuminate the trees. Between that and the snow we got today, the result is pretty sweet. I took this shot this evening, with my back to the Arboretum, looking past the fountain toward East Halls.
If you look closely, you can see the tracks of a cross-country skier in the foreground.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 19, 2009
Stanley Weintraub Publishes Yet Another Book
You might remember our story a few years back on retired Evan Pugh professor of English Stanley Weintraub ’56g, who has written books at an astonishing rate for decades. He’s at well over 50 books, and retirement hasn’t slowed him at all.
He’s got a new one coming out that’s themed perfectly for the season: “Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah 1864.” It is, believe it or not, his fourth book centering on what The Providence Journal reviewer called “the intersection of war and the birthday of the Price of Peace.” That is, war and Christmas.
This one recounts the tale surrounding Gen. William T. Sherman’s message to President Abraham Lincoln on Dec. 22, 1964: “I beg to present to you as a Christmas-gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.”
You can read another review of the book here, and a feature on Weintraub and the book here. It’s arrived just in time for us last-minute shoppers who have history buffs on their shopping lists.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Add comment December 18, 2009
The Women’s Volleyball Team Inches Closer…
…to an unprecedented third straight NCAA championship. The Nittany Lion women put a little scare into their fans last night in the NCAA semifinals, losing the first set to Hawaii, but they came back to win the match, 23-25, 25-18, 25-15, 25-18. It was the team’s 101st consecutive win and head coach Russ Rose’s 1000th career win, but more importantly, it puts Penn State in the national title match Saturday night.
One of our most popular blog posts of the past year was one involving these amazing athletes. We took readers behind the scenes at a photo shoot last January for our March-April 2009 issue. Not surprisingly, that posting—called “Fun With the Women’s Volleyball Team”—is getting a lot of hits again lately, and if you’ve never seen it, you might want to check it out. It includes a short video clip from the photo shoot.
Tomorrow night’s final pits No. 1 Penn State (37-0) against No. 2 Texas (29-1). It’ll be televised nationally on ESPN2 starting at 8 p.m.
You can read coverage of last night’s win at gopsusports.com and at the Tampa Tribune (the NCAAs are at the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa this year). And you can also follow the Penn State team’s adventures on Twitter.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 18, 2009
Becoming a Penn Stater
I didn’t grow up in a Penn State family—my uncle (Bill Wolfersberger ’49) went to Penn State, but he was the only one. My dad and oldest brother went to F&M; my mom, to Gettysburg; my sister started at Adelphi and finished at Pitt; my other brother went to RIT.
How I ended up at Penn State is a long story, but the short version is that I didn’t go to college right out of high school—I played around in radio for a while instead, moving up to State College at the age of 18 to be the all-night DJ on QWK Rock. From there I worked in radio journalism for a few years, and finally, at the age of 22, I decided, “OK, I’m ready to go to college now.” Since I was already living in State College, it just made sense to go to Penn State.
I mention this because the paths people take to Penn State can be pretty varied, and over the years I’ve heard some great stories about this. We’ve decided to turn that idea—How did you become a Penn Stater?—into a story, one of those articles where we collect your stories and print the best of them in the magazine. The details are here; we’d love to hear your tale, and maybe it’ll be one of the ones we use.
Tina Hay, editor
Add comment December 17, 2009
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