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."
March 30, 2022
Oil prices are set by the global market, so they will go up regardless of the U.S. supply of oil, according to climate expert Elisabeth Moyer.
She says the issue with the Keystone pipeline is that when it was envisioned in 2008, we really needed it. However, now, the United States is a net exporter of oil.
“We were willing to suffer a lot of potential environmental harm to have oil which was seen as a strategic national interest because U.S. production was declining.”
“It’s a prehistoric idea, the keystone pipeline. We’re arguing over something that’s just not relevant to modern conditions,” Moyer added.
March 29, 2022
Graduate student alum Xike (Nicole) Nie, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech, has won the inaugural University of Chicago "Science as Art" contest for her entry, "Chondrules in Meteorites #5". Congratulations Xike!