External Posts

The Boston Globe highlighted the Colby Museum's Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village exhibition, noting that it’s one of a handful of shows that will enrich your summer.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch is coeditor of the newly released book Water and Sea in Word and Image / L’Eau et la mer dans les textes et les images (Brill, 2023), a selection of papers drawn from the 2021 International Association of Word and Image Studies conference. Plesch also contributed a paper to the book, “The River of Life: Drawing Lessons from Thomas Cole in Images and Words” (pages 128–143). Summer research assistants Ari Trueba '23 and Lydia Burke '24 helped Plesch with preparation of the book's text, and the design for the book's cover is based on a template created by Rachel Tobie '04.

Featured in National Geographic, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Dale Kocevski, is part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) research team actively working with NASA and the James Webb Telescope to unveil the hidden secrets of the universe. Their latest finding is a giant black hole roughly nine million times the mass of the sun that formed when the universe was just a toddler.

 

Referenced in the article are two other early supermassive black holes that Kocevski and his research team at Colby, including Associate Professor Elizabeth McGrath, are responsible for initially finding.

 

"It was thought that lower-mass black holes had to exist in early galaxies, but I didn't think we could find them with these observations," said Kocevski. "The most surprising thing for me is that JWST has proven to be more sensitive than we could have hoped for."

The Society for Organic Petrology has awarded its Ralph Gray Award for best refereed paper in organic petrology for 2022 to Robert A. Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, Emeritus, and Ian Glasspool, a research scientist in Colby's Geology Department. The award acknowledges the geologists' paper "Silurian wildfire proxies and atmospheric oxygen,” which was published in the journal Geology and garnered BBC and international attention. The paper discusses the geologists' research that concludes the earliest wildfires began burning about 430 million years ago, or 10 million years earlier than previously known. A formal award presentation will be held Sept. 19, 2023, at the University of Patras, Rio-Patras, Greece, where the society's annual meeting takes place.    

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson was invited to speak at a panel event on innovative finance for loss and damage at the International Peace Institute (IPI), a think tank based at the United Nations. Chaired by IPI President and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights H. E. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, panelists discussed the deficiencies and shortfalls in loss and damage finance, and they underscored innovative ways to capitalize on the new fund, including taxes and levies. Robinson, in contextualizing the perspective of small island developing states, emphasized that loss and damage is about people and their livelihoods: “People matter, and we need to center equity and justice.” The event was attended by senior officials from across the United Nations system, including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Associate Professor of Astronomy Dale Kocevski was the lead author in an article recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters titled "Hidden Little Monsters: Spectroscopic Identification of Low-Mass, Broad-Line AGN at z>5 with CEERS." Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Kocevski and an international team of researchers identified two low-luminosity black holes using JWST NIRSpec spectroscopy from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey. “Our findings show that growing black holes in infant galaxies are very common in the early universe,” said Kocevski. “This was something that we did not expect to detect with our observations. We knew lower-mass black holes had to exist in early galaxies, but we didn’t think we could find them.”

Colby's role in the dramatic discovery of distant black holes was covered by a wide range of media, including the Associated Press, Forbes, and National Geographic. All of the stories had commentary from Dale Kocevski, associate professor of physics and astronomy, who noted that when it comes to black holes, "there are probably many more hidden little monsters out there."

A feature article by Mainebiz focused on the tremendous success surrounding the Waterville revitalization initiative and what’s in the future for the city. The story had commentary from a variety of leaders involved in the work, including a real estate developer who noted how “Colby has taken an unprecedented leadership role with its early downtown investments.”

Assistant Professor of Government Nick Jacobs was the lead source for a Fortune article about student loan forgiveness. Commenting on whether Congress would cancel student loan debt, he said it’s a “political nonstarter,” and that “those who are serious about the economic burdens imposed by student loans have yet to really come together.”