"Soil scientists get bacteria to report on what their neighbors are up to," the June 1 issue of The Scientist reviewed the ACS Synbio paper led by graduate student Shelly Cheng.
NSF features ratiometric reporter paper
NSF's Science360 News service featured Shelly, Ilenne and Xiaodong's recent ratiometric reporter paper.
Dr. Masiello appears on KUHF Houston Matters
This week Craig Cohen from Houston Matters hosted Carrie, Dominic Boyer (director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice), and Timothy Morton (Rita Shay Guffey Chair in English at Rice) to talk about the role of Houston in addressing pressing climate and environment problems. Click here for the audio.
New paper in AGU Journal of Geophysical Research: Short‐term changes in physical and chemical properties of soil charcoal support enhanced landscape mobility
In this paper we explore how charcoal physical and chemical properties contribute to greater vulnerability to physical redistribution, relative other forms of organic carbon, to enhance our understanding of charcoal's landscape residence time.
Plain English summary: charcoal is an important natural component of soil organic carbon, and soils with more charcoal tend also to be more productive and richer in carbon. However, there is uncertainty in what causes charcoal to remain in soils. We sampled soils repeatedly after a fire and found that charcoal was especially prone to landscape movement compared to other forms of soil carbon. This suggests that it may be preferentially buried, increasing the likelihood of storage in soils.
Check it out here!
Xiaodong is on his way to completing the six World Marathon Majors
Xiaodong completed the Berlin Marathon in 3:35 on September 24, coming one step closer to running six of the world's most-renowned marathons. In 2016, he completed the Chicago and Boston Marathons, and he hopes to finish the World Marathon Majors with New York City, Tokyo and London in 2019.
Read more about Xiaodong's story in Rice News!
Dr. Masiello elected fellow of the Geological Society of America
Congratulations to Dr. Masiello, who was chosen as one of the new 2017 Geological Society of America Fellows!
Read more about the announcement on Rice News.
Yi awarded Shell Center for Sustainability Fellowship
Yi has been selected as a winner of the 2016 Shell Center for Sustainability Fellowship, which she will use to lead an interdisciplinary project that models the dynamics of the nitrogen cycle in biochar-amended soils. Congrats, Yi!
Read more about the award on Rice News.
NSF awards Rice $1.7 million grant to acquire new mass spectrometer
The NSF has awarded Rice a $1.7 million grant for a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer (TOF-SIMS), which will allow Rice scientists to study chemical compositions and molecular structures of substances ranging from cells to rocks. Dr. Masiello and department chair Cin-Ty Lee are co-investigators on the grant, with principal investigator Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering professor Rafael Verduzco.
Read more about the grant on Rice News.
Team led by Dr. Masiello awarded a $1 million grant to develop biosensors for soil
The W.M. Keck Foundation awarded Rice University scientists a $1 million grant to develop microbial biosensors for soil. The grant will support Dr. Masiello, Dr. Jonathan Silberg, Dr. Matthew Bennett and the group's Shelly Cheng, who are combining Earth science with synthetic biology to approach soil science from the microbial scale.
Read more about the award and the work it has supported on Rice News and on our Research page (Developing Biosensors for Earth System Science).