ABSTRACT LiveSci in the Valley of the Last Dinosaurs ( http://lastdinos.livesci.org/ ) was a website and social media presence that provided the global online community with unprecedented access to the exciting paleontological research happening in the remote badlands of North Dakota and Montana in the summer of 2016. A collaborative team of researchers, students, and citizen scientists from around the world excavated some of the last dinosaurs that ever walked the Earth, mapped the K/Pg boundary in high resolution, and uncovered fossils that show us how life recovered after the extinction of the dinosaurs. To engage the public in the ongoing process of scientific discovery, dedicated project staff and participating researchers posted videos, photos, blog entries, and social media content nearly every day during the seven-week field season. Researchers and science educators from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Denver Museum of Nature & Science, along with collaborators from Brooklyn College, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Yale Peabody Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Marmarth Research Foundation, were joined by young scientists and citizen scientist volunteers of all ages. The production team consisted of high school and college interns, public science outreach professionals, and research scientists. To expand the reach of the project, a bilingual intern maintained a parallel Spanish website. Hundreds of thousands of online viewers watched, contributed, and shared these authentic experiences with their communities during the live portion of the project, and many more continue to access the archived website and social media content. This project exemplifies how social media and real-time interaction with scientists have the potential to connect the public to science as it unfolds, removing myths and stereotypes about how science happens and who scientists are. Initiatives such as this one help to create citizens who are more connected to the process of science and who can use that understanding in their lives through more informed decision making.

Concentrations of radon-222 in soil gas measured over about 1 yr at a monitoring site in Denver, Colorado, vary by as much as an order of magnitude seasonally and as much as severalfold in response to changes in weather. The primary weather factors that influence soil-gas radon concentrations are precipitation and barometric pressure. Soil characteristics are important in determining the magnitude and extent of the soil’s response to weather changes. The soil at the study site is clay rich and develops desiccation cracks upon drying that increase the soil’s permeability and enhance gas transport and removal of radon from the soil. A capping effect caused by frozen or unfrozen soil moisture is a primary mechanism for preventing radon loss to the atmosphere.

Abstract Questions relating to the past distribution of faunas, floras and sediments, the meaning of distributional patterns, and causes of changes in past distributions have greatly interested many scientists for more than a century. These problems take on added importance when viewed in the context of recent theories of plate tectonics and redistribution of crustal blocks. This volume presents the results of a Research Symposium, which was given at the annual meeting of SEPM in Denver, Colorado on April 18, 1972. The resulting papers view paleogeographic provinces and provinciality over a broad spectrum. The papers are so completely diverse in their approaches to the subject that their concepts and terminologies commonly contrast strongly, the culmination of which should be the vigorous rejuvenation and reexamination of concepts and hypotheses in paleogeography and provinciality.