This was the Sunday hat worn by Earl Morris, the Carnegie archeologist who inspired the character Indiana Jones.

“A Centennial of Cosmic Importance” proclaimed the December 10 Washington Post. Its “Out & About” column featured Carnegie president Maxine Singer and the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism’s (DTM) Senior Fellow Vera Rubin at Carnegie’s centennial gala on December 6. The December 11 New York Times reported on the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Medals of Philanthropy (see page 3) and quoted Singer about the vitality of the various Carnegie institutions today.

The Washington Post’s December 28 “Weekend” section reviewed Carnegie’s centennial exhibition, Our Expanding Universe. WTOP radio’s Man About Town also carried an interview with Maxine Singer in response to the exhibition opening. The Washington Post Magazine featured a historical snippet about the DTM Van de Graaff generator in its “Backlight” section December 30. On January 14, Insight Magazine of the Washington Times published a four-page interview with Maxine Singer that included her thoughts on what 100 years of Carnegie science have meant to science in the United States and what the state of elementary science education is today. The “Metropolitan” section of the February 7 Washington Times contained a front-page article,“Saluting Human Curiosity,” detailing what visitors can expect from the centennial exhibition. It paid particular tribute to Vera Rubin and her work on dark matter. In addition, Carnegie’s 100 years of science was the cover story of the February 25 Chemical & Engineering News.

“Carnegie to Launch New Ecology Dept.” appeared on the front page of the November 29 Stanford Daily. Both Chris Field and Joe Berry of Global Ecology were quoted extensively on the goals of the new department and on details of the environmentally aware building that will be constructed on the Stanford campus.

Wes Huntress, director of the Geophysical Lab and new president of the Planetary Society, was interviewed in the November/December Planetary Report. He talked about astrochemistry, the idea that life may have originated in the subsurface of Earth, and his years at NASA, among other topics. Vera Rubin’s professional and personal story was profiled in the February 8 issue of Science. Trustee Sandra Faber, astronomer at UC-Santa Cruz, was also quoted in the article.

The fall issue of California Wild,a publication of the California Academy of Sciences, mentioned the work of George Wetherill and Alan Boss of DTM. Wetherill’s calculations showing how important the planet Jupiter is for keeping Earth safe from impacts from extraterrestrial sources were cited, as was Boss’s model showing how gas giants can coalesce quickly.

The October announcement of the discovery of two planets orbiting in circular orbits much like Earth’s attracted a lot of attention. The October 16 USA Today quoted Paul Butler of DTM on the subject. Butler emphasized that the finds were not really “Earth-like planets, as they have masses similar to Jupiter.” Perhaps the biggest story on extrasolar planets appeared in late November with the announcement of the detection of the first exoplanet with an atmosphere.

Alan Boss served on the NASA Space Science Update panel to discuss implications of the find. He was quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the International Herald Tribune, among other sources.

Boss continues to be busy fielding questions about other unusual celestial discoveries, including what some call “free floating planets.” These nonorbiting objects, which are more massive than the massive planets but less massive than brown dwarfs, hover around nearby stars and have been the subject of much debate. Boss developed a model showing how they could form if the effects of the magnetic fields in a collapsing gas cloud are considered. He was cited in the November 24 New Scientist, the January 4 Science, and the January Discover magazine on this subject. The January 12 New Scientist talked about Boss and Paul Butler in an article that provided a roundup of the theories arising to explain the growing diversity of extrasolar planetary finds. That month, Boss also was quoted in publications including the New York Times, Science News, USA Today, and the Christian Science Monitor about the use of adaptive optics—a technique that compensates for the blurring effects of the atmosphere—to directly detect extrasolar planets. As Boss said, advances like these are “just tantalizing appetizers for things to come.” Finally, in the frenzy of coverage of continuing planetary finds, new DTM Staff Member Alycia Weinberger was featured in the April issue of Sky & Telescope in an article about her team’s find of an inner warp in a disk around the star Beta Pictoris, which could indicate the presence of a giant planet, and might aid in our understanding of how our solar system formed.