Published May 17, 2024 by Alaska Native News

The Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program celebrated its largest-ever graduating class of full-time Acceleration Academy students. Fifty-two students from the Anchorage, Bethel, Matanuska-Susitna and statewide campuses earned their high school diplomas this past weekend. They also earned an impressive total of 3,336 college credits earned for free as ANSEP Acceleration Academy students. In addition to its high school graduates, there are 10 impressive ANSEP University Success graduates this May, seven of whom graduated with their bachelor’s degree and three with their master’s. 

ANSEP’s Acceleration Academy began as a summer initiative for high school students to earn college credits at no cost, and it has since expanded to include a full-time, academic-year opportunity that continues to grow year over year. The 2024 class of full-time Acceleration Academy graduates is 60% larger than the 2023 graduating class — showing ANSEP’s continued success in expanding academic opportunities to more and more Alaskans.

In Acceleration Academy, students fulfill their high school graduation requirements through college coursework completed throughout the academic year. The average Acceleration Academy graduate begins their undergraduate degree with completed credits similar to those of a college junior, effectively bypassing two years of college courses and associated tuition costs.

Students who participate in Acceleration Academy throughout all four years of high school can go from eighth grade to a bachelor’s degree in just five years. This helps students and their families save over $75,000 in college costs, and state, local and federal governments spend only one third of the cost they would normally expend for a student to earn a degree at the University of Alaska.

Published May 17, 2024 by https://www.kucb.org/people/maggie-nelson

A strong parade of storms has been making its way through the North Central Pacific Ocean, and the location of the jet stream has produced colder storms for Unalaska and the Aleutian region this spring. That’s according to Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center with the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Over the last six weeks, say, the Aleutians have been on the north side of the prevailing storm track, and so on the cold side of the storms,” Thoman said. “If the jet stream was say 500 miles farther north, it would still be stormy, but it wouldn't be nearly as cold.”

Cold air from above the North Slope brought another round of wintery weather to Western Alaska, the Eastern Aleutians, Kodiak Island and into South Central as well, according to Thoman.

“That was basically a blob of cold air that came down from the high Arctic from north of the North Slope, and it moved southwest through the Bering Strait down through the eastern Bering Sea, and is now actually moving into the western Gulf of Alaska,” he said.

While it has been a harsh spring for the region, these “blobs” are pretty normal for this time of year, Thoman said.

“As the high latitude atmosphere transitions from winter to summer, we get these little knots of cold air that will float around,” he explained. “Oftentimes, they will get stuck [in the] northern Bering Sea or northward and not move any farther south. But this one is doing the full tour.”

It even made a stop in Anchorage last week.

Published May 16, 2024 by Yereth Rosen

Fifty years ago, work crews began a rush job to build what was then called the Haul Road, the gravel route to the site on the North Slope where the nation’s biggest oil field had been discovered. The road to the Prudhoe Bay oil field was completed quickly to accommodate the rushed construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

Now a traveling exhibit memorializes the five-month construction of the road now called the Dalton Highway.

The exhibit opened on April 29 at the Petroleum Club of Anchorage in the city’s Midtown district, where it was kicked off with a packed reception.

There have been other historical presentations telling the road’s story. The University of Alaska Museum of the North had an exhibit in 2015 and 2016, with information still available online. Through the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Project Jukebox program, a graduate student collected oral histories and photographs for a 2007 thesis.

Published May 16, 2024

The University of Alaska McNair Scholars Program is bringing eight current scholars and two alumni to attend the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference this weekend.

Sunny Mall is the coordinator and director for the University of Alaska Anchorage McNair program, which has been operational for about a year and a half and is available for students at all UA campuses and community colleges.

According to the UAA website, the McNair Scholars Program “prepares high-achieving first generation income eligible students for graduate study.”

The program is funded by a TRIO grant from the U.S. Department of Education. There are 201 universities across the country with access to this funding opportunity, Mall said.

The UAA program currently has 21 undergraduate scholars enrolled in the program across all different fields of study. Some of the students are international and some are from rural Alaska communities, Mall said.

Published May 15, 2024 by Lauren Wilson

Biologists have long sought general principles to understand the ecology and evolution of organisms. The global distribution of animals is something that scientists have tried to explain for centuries and has important implications for crafting conservation strategies. One such explanation for the modern distribution of animals is Bergmann’s rule. The rule predicts that homeotherms (animals with constant body temperatures) living in cooler climates (typically higher latitudes) tend to be larger than those in warmer climates (lower latitudes). Commonly cited examples of this phenomenon include Arctic polar bears being larger than bears in more southern environments, like Southeast Asian sun bears and black bears, and Antarctic emperor penguins being larger than Galápagos penguins. However, it is uncertain whether the rule applies across long stretches of geologic time or has been a major driver of body size evolution. Our study tackles this question from a palaeontological and evolutionary perspective by applying phylogenetic methods and climate modelling to a large dataset of fossil occurrences and living species.

First, we need to account for plate tectonics, as the current locations of fossil sites are not representative of where they were buried millions of years ago. 

Second, we also must factor in past climates, as the Mesozoic was much more temperate than the present. To do this, we collaborated with Dr. Alex Farnsworth (University of Bristol) and utilised the HadCM3BL model. This allowed us to estimate the local environmental temperatures at the time dinosaurs were living, which is essential for understanding the effect temperature may have had on dinosaur body size evolution.

Third, utilising fossil data calls for a sampling bias metric. This measures for fossil record biases, including if larger species are overrepresented in the fossil record or if biases exist against the preservation of smaller fossils. The geological processes that buried and preserved bones millions of years ago did not treat all animals equally. Smaller bones may be more prone to destruction, and when we palaeontologists find fossils today, we are more likely to overlook small bones in the field. Our sampling bias metric found that the observed variation in Mesozoic dinosaur and mammal body size was not biased by these preservational effects.

We tested for a relationship between size and temperature, but in an evolutionary context to account for the shared ancestry of species. This is an important step and criterion of Bergmann’s rule, as an animal’s body size is strongly influenced by that of their ancestors. For instance, you’d expect a polar bear to be more similar in body size to a black bear due to more recent common ancestry than to something much more distantly related, such as a crocodile. Our phylogenetic approach tests if the amount of change in body size along a branch or lineage correlates with the amount of change in local temperatures estimated from the HadCM3BL model. We would expect an inverse relationship between the two if decreasing temperatures were selecting for increases in body size. We found no signal for Bergmann’s rule in Mesozoic dinosaurs or mammals (Figure 3).