News

Bard College, supported by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) REV Campus Challenge, announced today the launch of a new website to be a centralized, public resource for exploring sustainable micro hydropower in New York State. The website also documents this process for the Saw Kill Micro Hydropower Project on the Bard Campus, including the installation of real-time water quality monitoring equipment.

The website is organized to streamline and standardize the process for evaluating and implementing a potential micro hydropower site responsibly. The site breaks down the requirements for assessing, implementing, and maintaining a micro hydropower system. Using the Saw Kill Project as an example, lessons learned are provided as a resource for landowners, local governments, and researchers alike.

The MicrohydroNY website will be updated on a regular basis with news about the Saw Kill Project and changes that affect micro hydropower in New York State. Visitors are encouraged to explore the website and sign up for direct emails from MicrohydroNY at microhydrony.org.
 

Ninety-five countries now own military drones, a sharp increase from 2010, and drone operations are becoming deeply embedded in armed forces worldwide in ways that are changing global security, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. The report found not just a rising number of drones but also an expanding infrastructure of military bases, test sites, and training academies to support the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles. “A lot of countries, not just technologically advanced countries … have gone out to create drone programs,” said Dan Gettinger, codirector of the center and the report’s author, who used open-source data for the research. Unmanned aerial vehicles, he said, “are featuring more prominently in world affairs, as we’ve seen most recently in the Saudi drone attacks.”

The paper, by Bard alum Silas E. Busch ’16 and Professor Arseny S. Khakhalin, builds on a study undertaken by Busch for his Senior Project in biology. Busch explored whether different neurons in the optic tectum of Xenopus tadpoles—the part of the brain that helps tadpoles navigate in the water without running into objects or each other—are tuned to synaptic inputs of different duration. What he found is that most tectal neurons do have a preference for either short or long patterns of activation, and that this preference changes depending on what tadpoles see and hear. It means that the tadpole brain as a whole, and each individual neuron within it, adjusts to changes in the animal’s environment, enabling the tadpole to better navigate and survive. The paper describes this particular type of neuron-by-neuron “temporal tuning” in the tectum for the first time, applying an electrophysiological measuring technique called dynamic clamp in an entirely new way. 

Bard Faculty and Students in Chemistry and Physics Collaborate on Newly Published Research

In recent years, scientists have developed a new set of techniques to thin down certain materials into sheets that are only a few atoms thick—the most famous example being graphene, a one-atom thin layer of graphite that holds the title of world’s thinnest material. Graphene and its thin cousins hold promise both for being implemented in new technology and in helping physicists understand the quantum properties of materials. In making prototype devices from them, researchers often need to shape these sheets into particular patterns with features measured in nanometers.

Noting that conventional methods for doing this require multistep processes that can damage the materials, Ethan Richman ’20 led a team of undergraduates working in the labs of Bard Chemistry Professor Chris LaFratta and Physics Professor Paul Cadden-Zimansky to pioneer a potentially cleaner and faster way of slicing graphene at the nanoscale by using a high-powered laser beam focused into a microscope. While a handful of other research groups around the world have tried using lasers for graphene slicing, the Bard researchers noticed that laser cuts in air can damage the graphene at the atomic level. Taking a cue from techniques used in industrial laser cutting, Richman tried modifying the cutting technique by submerging the graphene in water and found this improved both the quality and efficiency of the cutting. Their results are published in Optics Materials Express, with Cadden-Zimansky, LaFratta, and eight student collaborators as coauthors.