 | | |  | | |  | | |  | |  | | To opt out of future mailings, please e-mail the list manager. | | |
| Profiles in Team Science published | | The National Science Foundation (NSF), under a Discovery Corps Senior Fellowship from the NSF Chemistry Division, recently published a booklet entitled Profiles in Team Science. NCED is among the many NSF science and technology centers profiled. Click here to read more about this project and to view a pdf of the booklet. | | NCED involved in education outreach | | NCED believes in sharing with industry the technology gained through its research. As a result, NCED hosts short courses on shallow water and deep water depositional processes for various oil companies. NCED Director Chris Paola teaches the short course on shallow water, and NCED PI Gary Parker teaches the deep water short course. This month, Parker taught his deep water short course for ExxonMobil employees at the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This short course included a variety of demonstrations and lectures on deep-sea turbidity currents and submarine debris flows and the deposits they create. The take-away for course participants was an understanding (visceral and mechanistic) of the processes that create deep-sea sediment deposits appropriate for hydrocarbon reservoirs. This understanding will help ExxonMobil better locate oil and gas reservoirs in the field. |  | | Group picture of ExxonMobil participants attending the deep water short course. | | | | | Rain table at the Science Museum of Minnesota | | Rain table, an exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), is a two-dimensional map of locations around the Earth on a large, high-resolution digital table made of LCD flat panels. This exhibit, developed by NCED, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and SMM, allows museum visitors to rain on a location, or locations, by placing a wireless puck on the table. The puck's coordinates, read by a mathematical rain-runoff simulation model, generates a real-time visual of rainfall(s), stream development, and the effect of these streams as they merge with one another and flow into lakes, rivers, and oceans. This fall, rain table will also provide interactive simulations of other natural processes: sediment flux, pyroclastic flow, lava flow, tsunamis, and glaciers. In the near future, rain table will be part of a local SMM/NCED water exhibit (opening fall 2008) and will be available as an educational tool for students to use in the K-16 classroom. With rain table, everyone can better understand how rain or pollutants, such as lawn chemicals, can make their way to the sea. |  | | Visitors using wireless pucks to interactively "rain" on Hawaii's Big Island. | | |
| |
