Research round up: Galaxies, academic achievement, snails

These days, Penn researchers are studying everything from skies to the seas - and the people in between.

One team of Penn researchers has discovered about 1,000 galaxies since 2006 with the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope.

Physics and Astronomy researcher Matthew Truch, who has worked on the project since 2002, said BLAST is the only way to see the earliest starburst, or newly formed, galaxies because the atmosphere is too opaque on the ground.

"We want to get a statistical view of the lifetime of these galaxies," he said. "The telescope looks at about a billion or two years after the big bang. . Whenever you look at something you are looking into the past" because the light takes many years to reach the Earth.

Truch explained that when galaxies form, stars form in a cloud of gas and dust that make an opaque color. This blocks and absorbs the light and makes viewing the stars with optical telescopes difficult.

Launched in December 2006 from Antarctica, the balloon was airborne about two weeks.

But Truch said the landing destroyed parts of the telescope. The group is modifying the scope to withstand the landing and is planning another launch for December 2010.

A team of researchers in the Graduate School of Education will soon begin studying students' academic achievements from high school to college to measure the benefits of the International Baccalaureate program, as well as other similar accelerated programs.

The two-year project will collect data from IB students who ended their education after high school, as well as those who went to college. GSE associate professor chairwoman Laura Perna, who is involved in the project, said she anticipates results within the first six months.

The group will also look at a control group of students not in the IB program.

"I hope that we will find [the IB] curriculum improves students' academic achievements," Perna said, or at least discover which parts of the program need improvement.

Biology professor Peter Petraitis recently completed work, started in 2006, assessing the growth of snails.

Petraitis worked with former graduate student Jonathan Fisher, to measure 100-year-old Atlantic dogwhelk snail shells. The two noticed that the shells were smaller than modern snail shells of the same species.

They found that "the shells are 23-percent larger than they were in 1915," Petraitis said.

One possible explanation for this is that snails are "growing faster," he said, but added that this isn't likely.

Alternatively, snails could be living longer.

"Snails never stop growing and an old snail is a big snail," Petraitis said. If snail predators have been fished out, snails might have longer life-expectancies.

The third option is the introduction of an alien species, the carcinus green crab, which might have caused the snails to make harder shells. He said this would be hard to prove.

He compared the snails to humans.

"The average height of males attending Yale [University] in 1915 was [five-foot, nine-inches]," he said. A 20-percent increase of the average height would be about seven feet today - "a huge increase in about 100 years."

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