Tiffany Miele (Hawthorne, N.Y.), a second-year Environmental Management major, spent her summer internship looking through a microscope at organisms smaller than a grain of rice, using them to help answer much larger questions about the long-term health of Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, the source of the 444-mile Susquehanna River. Miele, an undergraduate research intern, worked with Dr. Mairi Meehan, Assistant Professor of Biology, on a project that sought to interpret 30 years of zooplankton monitoring data to identify and describe ecosystem change in the lake.

Pliny the Younger witnessed the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago and recorded the day’s events with enough detail that scientists are now able to benchmark the argon-argon dating method, one of the most versatile, spanning the present to the beginning of the solar system. After resolving ambiguities about the date — Aug. 24, 79 CE — UC Berkeley scientists significantly improved the method’s accuracy and precision. They also increased the precision of potassium-40’s half-life.

Researchers at the University of Würzburg have shown that plants communicate root injuries in milliseconds via mechanical signals. A drop in hydraulic pressure serves as a rapid alarm system for neighboring roots.

A new approach that uses specially engineered pulses of light to switch the magnetic states of a material could lead to faster, smaller and more energy-efficient data storage.

Inspired by the ionic signaling of our nervous system, researchers built sensors and therapeutic devices that can communicate and coordinate with each other through tissue.

Twistronics has become a new alchemy of materials. By choosing atomically thin layers, stacking them and changing their relative angle, researchers can create electronic behavior absent from the original ingredients.

Now, in two back-to-back papers publishing in Science on September 24, an international collaboration provides both the building blocks and a guide to that vast search. The first maps the electronic structures and topology of nearly 9,000 two-dimensional entries, whether topological or not. The second identifies more than 1,600 candidates for twisting, with different electronic starting points that could enable entirely new kinds of quantum simulators.

“Every new family of twisted materials gives us a chance to ask a different question about quantum matter. We want to move beyond the few platforms we know and explore the enormous range of physics that other layers and other twists could make possible,” said B. Andrei Bernevig, a Princeton professor of physics and coauthor of both studies.

New analyses of ancient cattle, sheep and goat bones on Madagascar suggest the rapid spread of introduced livestock on the island 1,200 years ago coincided with forest loss and population declines of large native herbivores.