May 12, 2022
Tornadoes have been seen on every continent, but due to its geography the mainland U.S. typically records more tornadoes per year than anywhere else in the world. Before the mid-twentieth century, our understanding of how they worked, why they formed, and how to predict them, was very limited. They can be devastating, but they strike with relative infrequency and without much warning—all of which makes them difficult to study.
Prof. Tetsuya "Ted" Fujita's goal was to create categories that could separate weak tornadoes from strong ones. The F Scale also met a need to rate both historical and future tornadoes according to the same standards.
Get blown over with more info on "Mr.Tornado" and the Enhanced Fujita Scale right here!
May 03, 2022
The Phoenix Sustainability Initiative brings together more than 70 members to spread awareness about the imminent threat of climate change and environmental degradation—and the dire consequences of inaction.
Founded in 2013, Phoenix Sustainability Initiative is currently being led by fourth-years Mercer Winer, Terra Baer and Shannon Davis. With more than 70 members, the student-run organization is filled with “go-getters who see a problem and fix it with a ‘sky’s the limit’ mentality,” said Davis, PSI’s co-president and student in Environmental Science.
April 07, 2022
Awarded to a person or group who have made major advances in evolutionary science.
The citation for the 2022 award reads, "David Jablonski has been one of the most influential and innovative palaeobiologists: a leader in the use of large-scale data sets to investigate macroevolutionary pattern over diverse temporal scales and levels in taxonomic hierarchy. His contributions cover topics as diverse as the effect of larval ecology on evolution, causes of the latitudinal diversity gradient, determinants and consequences of geographic range size, the origin and fate of evolutionary novelties, species selection, and, of pressing relevance, the biology and evolutionary impact of mass extinctions. Working with organisms from molluscs to mammals he has demonstrated that morphologically defined genera are largely concordant with clades present in molecular phylogenies, with coherent macroecological properties (like geographic range and body size), and therefore valid and meaningful evolutionary units for analyses of both fossil and living organisms. He is a tireless advocate for palaeobiology, and, more broadly, evolutionary biology."