Aid for Science Ed Recognizing the dire need for better and more diverse instruction in science and math, the National Science Foundation will provide more than $725,000 to the FSU Noyce Scholarship Program. The program, headed by Joseph Travis, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and professor of biological science, is designed to encourage students from diverse backgrounds to become science and math teachers in high-needs, K-12 classrooms, and to support them as they gain teaching experience.

The Noyce grant will provide 42 scholarships for students enrolled in FSU-Teach and 48 summer internships.

For more on Travis's research, please visit: http://bio.fsu.edu/~jtravis.

Archiving Earth's History A $2.5 million award from the National Science Foundation will go to principal investigator Sherwood Wise, professor of geological sciences. The funds will pay for significant improvements to services, equipment, and education and outreach programs of the 48-year-old Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility.

The facility - the largest repository of Southern Ocean piston cores in the world - houses more than 21,000 meters of cored sediment and other materials from the Antarctic that yield snapshots of geologic and climate history reaching 80 million years into the past.

Visit the Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility online at http://www.arf.fsu.edu.

A New Future for Forecasting The National Science Foundation committed more than $360,000 to support the research of Phillip Sura, assistant professor of meteorology. Sura is working to systematically map and analyze certain atmospheric variables, such as pressure, temperature and winds, to deepen scientists' understanding of extreme weather events, including hurricanes, and improve models for prediction.

Sura's work is part of FSU's Pathways of Excellence cluster that focuses on Extreme Events in Climate.

Read more about this interdisciplinary group of researchers at: http://www.met.fsu.edu/index.pl/personnel/faculty/sura.

Predicting El Niño Professor of oceanography Allan Clarke is set to receive $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to help fund his study of El Niño and the Southern Oscillation - periodic changes in the tropical Pacific that affect weather around the world. Clarke will investigate the coastal flow of the system's eastern boundary, the warm water volume of the equatorial Pacific and its use in predicting El Niño

El Niño events have been blamed for extreme weather conditions that lead to destructive flooding, drought and brush fires. More precise predictions of the Pacific cycle would help a wide range of government institutions and agricultural industries better prepare for potential El Niño-related disasters.

For more on Clarke's research, please visit: http://ocean.fsu.edu/faculty/clarke/clarke.html.

New Material for Electronics With an infusion of more than $150,000 from the National Science Foundation, Michael Shatruk, assistant professor of chemistry, will study promising materials that could be incorporated into new types of electronic devices.

Called spin crossover compounds, the materials are not new to science, but their potential applications have yet to be fully explored. Scientists are interested in these compounds for a specific magnetic property that could be useful in sensors and memory devices, and for those interested in energy and sustainability.

To learn more about Shatruk’s work, go to http://www.chem.fsu.edu/~shatruk.

Science on Defense About two decades before the environmental movement gained political traction, there was another force driving climate change science. This influence, rooted in the Cold War era, is being researched by Ronald Doel, professor of history, with an infusion of nearly $500,000 from the National Science Foundation.

Doel will explore recently declassified archival holdings to piece together the story of Pentagon leaders' concerns about an Arctic conflict with the former Soviet Union. More broadly, his work will detail how the perceived national security threat helped shape the earth sciences in the United States.

More on Doel's work can be found here: http://www.fsu.edu/~history/staff/doel.html.

A Female Influence Biologists have long recognized that male traits-elaborate plumage and bright colors in birds, for example-can become extreme when females prefer mates with a certain type of appearance or behavior. Only recently have they acknowledged that females can and do change their preferences.

Proposing to better understand the role of this variable in evolution, Emily DuVal, assistant professor of biological science was awarded $320,000 from the National Science Foundation.

DuVal studies sexual selection in the lance-tailed manakin. Her project will investigate how and why female manakins change their tastes.

Visit DuVal's Web site at http://bio.fsu.edu/duval.