Tribal language educator Mary Hermes at the University of Minnesota, Duluth documents endangered languages. With support from the National Science Foundation, her team is working with elders to record, translate, transcribe, and annotate conversations. At the same time she is helping train new scholars, young and old, who want to speak the Ojibwe language. Her team is going beyond just translating text; they're creating videos of conversations among the elders. The videos, which will be a...

There's been a lot of research on what happens to a river when dams go up, but what happens when the dam comes down? With support from the National Science Foundation, Dartmouth College geographer Frank Magilligan is researching the impact of dam removal. His lab has been the relatively small Homestead Dam, built more than 200 years ago along the Ashuelot River in New Hampshire. He and his team have collected data on the ecology and geology of the Ashuelot River both before and after the Dam...

Geologist John Goodge looks for clues about Antarctica's past in the two percent of the continent that is not covered in ice! The University of Minnesota, Duluth professor studies rocks that help provide evidence about how this desolate continent has formed and changed over time. He also hopes to get a better idea of what the Earth looked like long before the seven continents we have now. Goodge and his colleagues are supported by the U.S. Antarctic Program, which is managed by the National...

Next time you see a dragonfly, try to watch it catch its next meal on the go. Good luck! "Unless we film it in high speed, we can't see whether it caught the prey, but when it gets back to its perch, if we see it chewing, we know that it was successful," says Stacey Combes a biomechanist at Harvard University. With support from the National Science Foundation, she and her team are using high speed cameras to help them study how dragonflies pull off complicated aerial feats that include...

If you take a quick glance at the marsh next to Saquatucket Harbor in Harwich Port, Massachusetts, you will notice right away that some of the grass is missing. The cordgrass there, and all around Cape Cod, has been slowly disappearing for decades. "The cordgrass that's being destroyed here is the foundation species that builds salt marshes," explains marine ecologist Mark Bertness of Brown University. With support from the National Science Foundation, Bertness studies this critical...

Invasive species of earth worms have made their way north in the United States and are doing their job too well! They've moved into formerly worm-free forests, which rely on undecayed leaf matter. When worms decompose that leaf layer, the ecology may shift, making it uninhabitable for certain species of trees, ferns and wildflowers. It's of particular concern in the Great Lakes region when anglers simply dump their bait worms back into the soil, creating a difficult environment for old...

All of us use water and in the process, a lot of it goes to waste. Whether it goes down drains, sewers or toilets, much of it ends up at a wastewater treatment plant where it undergoes rigorous cleaning before it flows back to the environment. The process takes time, money and a lot of energy. What if that wastewater could be turned into energy? It almost sounds too good to be true, but environmental engineer Bruce Logan is working on ways to make it happen. Most treatment plants already use...

Go into any grocery store and cameras may be watching you. These cameras are not looking for thieves, they're looking for shoppers! The cameras are focused on the tops of peoples' heads (so it's anonymous), but they don't have to see faces to track which store aisles get the most traffic and how long consumers spend looking over products. With support from the National Science Foundation, computer scientist and CEO of VideoMining Rajeev Sharma and his team have designed software that...

The Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware aims to help communities become as prepared as possible for unplanned, sometimes unthinkable events. The Center's work and guidelines have been adopted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the American Red Cross, medical reserve groups, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Center's associate director, sociologist Tricia Wachtendorf, looked at specific events in lower...

Imagine a virtual computer simulation that reflects the world around you in real-time. Before you ever leave your home, a wealth of images and information about the world around you is at your finger-tips. Facial recognition might give information about the location of your friends, or maybe you want the latest scoop about the specials at local restaurants, or the real time locations and estimated arrival and departures of commuter trains. According to the Integrated Media Systems Center...