Author: College of Engineering

Professor Raymond Shaw’s (Physics) efforts to explain why so much snow falls in the Arctic, despite the paucity of nuclei for ice crystals, was described in the NBCNews.com story “Let it Snow: How White Stuff Comes Down Days on End.”

From Tech Today.

Let it snow: How the white stuff comes down for days on end in the Arctic

Researchers at Michigan Technological University in Houghton set out to investigate the mystery of where snow in the Arctic comes from, and how it can fall so persistently in the region.

“Within a few hours, you basically purge the atmosphere of all those particles,” Raymond Shaw, a physicist at Michigan Technological University, said in a statement. “So how can it snow for days on end?”

Read more at NBC News Science, by Denise Chow.

In the News

CBS Detroit ran a news story about the origin of snowflakes, based on Professor Raymond Shaw’s (Physics) research. See CBS Detroit.

From Tech Today.

Robert Nemiroff has been invited to speak in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History on Friday, 2014 January 3 at 6:15 pm at the invitation of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York. Lectures are held in the Kaufmann Theater on Central Park West.

This year he will be primarily presenting and describing the best astronomy videos featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day during the past two years: 2012 and 2013.

The science behind snow at Tech

According to Dr. Cantrell, associate professor of Physics and member of the Atmospheric Sciences interdepartmental PhD program, there are three reasons Tech gets so much snow.

The first reason is that it gets cold.

Read more at the Michigan Tech Lode, by Rand Silvers.

Three physics alumni reunited at the New Faculty Workshop, sponsored by the AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers), the AAS (American Astronomical Society), APS Physics, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and NSF (National Science Foundation). Changgong Zhou, ’06, Lin Pan, ’08, and Haiying He, ’09, were the only cohorts that originated from the same school and knew each other personally.

Zhou, now at Lawrence Tech University, was a student of Edward Nadgorny working on aperture assisted laser direct write. Pan, now at Cedarville University, studied atomic physics with Donald Beck. He, now at Valparaiso University, did research on electron transport in molecular systems with Ravi Pandey.

The Workshop for New Physics and Astronomy Faculty was held on November 7-10, 2013, in the American Center for Physics, College Park, MD. AAPT sponsors programs to help new faculty become more effective educators and support their quest to gain tenure.