Heard on the Hill: KU announces homecoming theme; KU research discredits really old fossils; more KU research shows CEOs don’t usually say many useful things in interviews

Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• KU’s Homecoming Committee has announced it has chosen the official theme for the upcoming homecoming activities in the fall.

And, without further ado, here it is:

“From Lawrence With Love.”

Homecoming week begins on Saturday, Sept. 24, and ends Saturday, Oct. 1 with the football game against Texas Tech.

Sixteen students have been selected to serve on the school’s homecoming committee.

More information is available at the Homecoming website, including an opportunity for folks to e-mail questions, ideas or suggestions to the committee for this year’s big bash.

• A KU geology professor has refuted the oldest fossil evidence of life on earth.

At least, that’s the idea behind a new paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

It all has to do with a 3.5-billion year old rock formation in Western Australia called the Apex Chert formation.

This Apex Chert (just a fun thing to say) formation was thought to have contained the oldest bacterial fossils on the planet.

Enter Alison Olcott Marshall, assistant KU professor of geology, and the rest of the team of scientists who worked on the paper.

Her team did a bunch of (allow me to use the technical term) science-y stuff to the Apex Chert material. Some of it sounds rather fun. I am particularly interested in Raman spectroscopy, which apparently involves a laser. But, anyway, Olcott Marshall and the rest of the team were able to identify that the fossils appeared to be made of haematite and quartz — neither of which is biological.

So, sadly for the Apex Chert, while this new research doesn’t seem to disprove the existence of life 3.5 billion years ago, it seems to show we haven’t found the fossils that prove it yet.

• Here’s some more KU research attracting some publicity, this time in the Wall Street Journal. Felix Meschke, an assistant professor of business, has some sobering news for journalists at CNBC who like to interview business leaders.

Meschke focused on CNBC interviews of CEOs, and wanted to see how they affected stock prices.

Given the legal restrictions on what CEOs can say, most of the interviews were pretty silly.

“They are a great laboratory experiment of something that looks like a news event but doesn’t actually disseminate new information,” Meschke told the Wall Street Journal. “We have something that’s almost pure media attention and really not much substance.”

Traders apparently do watch CNBC, and the interviews caused a little movement in stock prices, but those were typically moderated soon after the interview.

Also, there’s some advice for CEOs — laughter got you a temporary jump in stock prices. And stuttering typically meant a temporary dip.

Maybe CEOs could stand to use a little help from someone like Lionel Logue. (Yes, I did just see that movie for the first time last weekend.)

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