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When Mark Abbott and his team pulled a 300-foot-long core of mud from a lakebed high in the Peruvian Andes, he hoped it might provide a long-sought-after glimpse of the past 160,000 years of climate change.

Instead, the researchers revealed July 13 in the journal Nature, that lakebed recorded the ebb and flow of glaciers for more than 700,000 years — the longest-ever glacier record for the tropics, and among the longest records of historical climate, full stop. In that lake mud, the multi-institution team found clues for how climate change may shape the modern-day world.

“This is unlike anything we had before,” said Abbott, a geology and environmental science professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. “We now have a land-based record of glaciation from the tropics that is in many ways equal to our records from the ice caps at the poles and from the ocean, and that’s really been lacking.”

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In 2012, Corinne Richards-Zawacki ventured to her old field sites in the Panama rainforest in search of an elusive target: the variable harlequin frog, which had gone missing in the five years since she last visited.

It had been years since anyone reported seeing the species, and scientists were weighing whether to declare it extinct. But Richards-Zawacki and colleagues weren’t convinced. “We thought they deserved a second chance,” said Richards-Zawacki, a biology professor in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.

She was right.

On that first trip, the team found a single frog. Later, they saw signs of more, both the bright yellow object of her search and other species that scientists suspected had disappeared for good. It was a welcome surprise after years of witnessing amphibian declines.

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A new study from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University shows it’s possible to restore long-lost hand motion in stroke patients using a spinal cord implant. Though preliminary, the research has the potential to help those with an impairment that’s currently considered permanent — and leading the charge were Pitt PhD students.

“Millions of people have strokes, and of those people, the majority have some form of paralysis,” said Erynn Sorensen, a co-lead author of the paper and a PhD student in Pitt’s Rehab Neural Engineering Labs (RNEL). “There is a huge need for a technology like this. People want to be able to interact with the world around them.”

No other treatment exists for regaining hand movement in the “chronic” stage of stroke, six or more months after the stroke incident.

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Long gone are the days when war was waged — and peace was forged — on the battlefield alone. Today, conflicts like the Russia-Ukraine war or the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan may still be fought with guns and bombs, but efforts to stem the violence, help its victims and rebuild nations are unfolding in courtrooms and boardrooms, at international forums and in lawmakers’ halls. Countries in crisis need leaders who can operate in these spaces and who will work toward the highest ideals of the law.

That understanding was key to the creation of the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Law. Since Ronald Brand, Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg University Professor, became the founding director of the center in 1995, it has been preparing students — some of whom come from conflict zones — for careers in global law.

“Our alums become community leaders and policymakers advancing human rights in places like Syria and Kosovo,” says Charles Kotuby, a professor of practice in Pitt’s School of Law and executive director of the CILE. The center’s mission, he notes, is in keeping with the greatest ambitions of international law.

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