In Feb. Paul Silver was elected president of the Seismology Section of the American Geophysical Union. He was elected to the board of directors of UNAVCO, Inc.—a consortium of more than 30 universities doing research in geodesy—at its Mar. meeting in Colorado Springs. That month Silver also delivered a seminar at U. Michigan, where he collaborated with Prof. Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni, a former DTM postdoctoral fellow.

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In Feb. Vera Rubin presented the Thomas Edison Lecture at the Naval Research Laboratory. She also participated on a panel at the Smithsonian Institution on “Cosmological Mysteries: Physics in the 21st Century” with Sir Martin Rees, Cambridge U., and Nobel Laureate Joseph Taylor, Princeton U., to celebrate 50 years of Nobel Prizes. In Mar. Rubin delivered a popular lecture in the U. Maryland Distinguished Lecturer Series.

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2•Carnegie Fellow Eugenio Rivera arrived in late Feb. after completing his Ph.D. in physics and astronomy at SUNY-Stony Brook. Rivera’s thesis involved modeling scenarios for the progenitors of the Earth and the Moon. He and Jack Lissauer have also modeled the dynamics of the three planets in the Upsilon Andromedae system (discovered by Butler, Marcy, and colleagues) to address the question of the origin of the orbital eccentricities of the outer two planets. At DTM Rivera will look at the role of gas and dust in early planet evolution and the mechanisms for achieving orbital commensurabilities and other resonances.

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William White, a professor in the Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell U., was appointed a Merle A. Tuve Senior Fellow for the spring semester. White’s interests include isotope and trace element geochemistry and the dynamics and evolution of the Earth’s mantle. He delivered the Tuve Lecture on “Pb Isotopes and Models of Earth Structure and Evolution” in Apr. White was a predoctoral fellow at DTM from 1974 to 1975 and a postdoctoral fellow from 1977 to 1979.

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Satoshi Inaba was honored at a going-away party in late Mar. before returning to Japan to become a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. At DTM he worked with George Wetherill on new models and algorithms for calculating the formation of terrestrial, gas giant, and extraterrestrial planets.

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Predoctoral fellow Gregory Waite, a geophysics student at U. Utah, visited DTM this winter to work on data collected from a broadband seismic experiment designed to investigate the nature of the Yellowstone hotspot. He worked with Derek Schutt on analyzing split shear waves to investigate the pattern of seismic anisotropy and mantle flow near the hotspot.

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Darrell Hyde, a graduate student from Memorial U. of Newfoundland, left DTM in early May after a three-month stay with the geochemistry group. He worked with Steve Shirey on the Re-Os and platinum-group element geochemistry of gold-bearing banded iron formation from the Churchill Province of the Canadian Shield.

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Predoctoral fellow Ofra Klein BenDavid returned to the Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew U., after visiting DTM in Feb. While at DTM she worked with Erik Hauri, using the ion-microprobe to study the C and N isotopes and N abundances in inclusion-bearing diamonds to establish links between the chemistry of fluids and the chemistry of the diamonds in which they are hosted.

Conel Alexander, Larry Nittler, Sean Solomon, and postdoctoral fellows Steven Desch, Andrew Dombard, Steven Hauck, Nader Haghighipour, and Sujoy Mukhopadhyay gave papers at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston in Mar.

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Alan Boss spoke about magnetic fields and multiple protostar formation at the American Astronomical Society meeting, held in Jan. in Washington, DC, where he also participated in a press conference about adaptive optics searches for protoplanets. In Feb. he lectured on finding and forming planetary systems at the Smithsonian Institution’s program, “The Life Story of the Universe.” He reviewed models of triggered and magnetic star formation at the Workshop on Galactic Star Formation across the Stellar Mass Spectrum, held in La Serena, Chile, in Mar. Boss and Nader Haghighipour attended the Second Astrobiology Science Conference, held in Apr. at NASA Ames Research Center. Boss spoke on the implications for prebiotic chemistry of rapid ice giant planet formation, basing his remarks on a paper he coauthored with George Wetherill and Haghighipour. Haghighipour and Boss also presented a poster on migration of solids in a nebular disk due to pressure gradient and drag forces. Boss also wrote an article for the May-June Mercury magazine about the formation of gas giants, and his work was described in the March 6, 2002, New Scientist.

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Larry Nittler gave a colloquium on galactic chemical evolution at Case Western Reserve U. in Feb., as well as a presentation in Apr. on meteorite hunting in Antarctica to a third-grade class in Elmira, NY, via a teleconference.

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Sean Solomon served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (Mainz, Germany) in Feb. and as a member of an international expert committee for the Canada Foundation for Innovation in Mar. He delivered a seminar on seismic imaging of mantle plumes at U. Chicago in Apr.

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In Mar. Alycia Weinberger was a panelist at the Workshop on Future Far-IR and Submillimeter Astronomy at U. Maryland. Her article on dusty circumstellar disks, “Perspective,” appeared in Science in Mar. In Apr. she was an invited speaker at the Gillett Symposium in Tucson on Vega-type disks. Her work on Beta Pictoris was featured in the Apr. issue of Sky & Telescope and on astronomy.com and cnn.com. She was also quoted extensively in the May 4, Science News cover story, “Dusty Disks May Reveal Hidden Worlds.”

DTM/GL

Visiting Investigator V. Rama Murthy returned to DTM/GL in Feb. from U. Minnesota, where he is the Institute of Technology Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Geology and Geophysics. He plans to continue his experiments in the high-pressure lab of GL’s Yingwei Fei to determine the solubility of potassium in Fe-FeS melts and to explore the possibility for significant radiogenic heat production in the Earth’s core due to K decay. Such an additional heat source in the core has important implications for the geomagnetic dynamo, the age of the inner core, and the dynamics of the mantle.