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Check out the latest from NSF’s Science Matters blog.
Mon, 21 Sep 2020
Downloading data from black holes
Last year the Event Horizon Telescope released the first image of a black hole. This stunning feat was decades in the making.
The fastest way to send the largest data files is not by the internet -- it is by truck. Driving palettes of hard drives down dusty mountain roads is the only way to deliver the largest files of data from the remote observatories that take them to the computers that crunch them.
Buried within the precious cargo of ones and zeros from the observations of the Event Horizon Telescope are the hidden signatures of light from the edge of the universe – a black hole. On April 10, 2019, the team released the first-ever image of a black hole, which captivated the world. The technology to record these data was made possible by grants from the NSF going back nearly twenty years. How did we get here?
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Check out the latest from NSF’s Science Matters blog - September 24, 2020
09/24/2020
Mon, 24 Sep 2020
The science behind HBCU success
“Historically Black colleges and universities have proven to be extremely effective in graduating Black students, particularly in STEM. While HBCUs enroll about 9% of Black undergraduates in the U.S., they graduate a significantly higher percentage in critical fields such as engineering, mathematics and biological sciences. HBCUs represent seven of the top eight institutions that graduate the highest number of Black undergraduate students who go on to earn S&E doctorates.
Despite the positive statistics and many success stories, not nearly enough scholarships exist surrounding the best practices at HBCUs or how to replicate them. The U.S. National Science Foundation established the HBCU STEM Undergraduate Success Research Center (STEM-US) to examine these strategies and how they might broadly inform higher education overall. Led by researchers at Morehouse College, Spelman College and Virginia State University, STEM-US will study and model the broadening participation success of 50 out of the nation’s 100 HBCUs.
To learn more about this program, the HBCU way of life and the challenges HBCU researchers face, we talked with NSF Program Officer Claudia Rankins, who manages NSF's HBCU program, and Cheryl Talley, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Virginia State University and one of NSF's HBCU program's lead researchers.”
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