The American Geosciences Institute's Workforce Program was able to analyze data on 18,000 precollege students who indicated an inclination towards a major in the physical sciences and scored well on the SAT in 2012 and in 2013.

The world is buzzing with the hum of servers containing terabytes of the world's collective datasets. And the geosciences are no different. Geoscientists are awash in data like never before. The challenge now for the geoscience community is how to best integrate disparate datasets for communal use and establish uniform standards for data entry. Now, communities of computer scientists and geoscientists are coming together to tackle the challenge of how best to integrate the wealth of data describing the earth system and to encourage geoscientists to dust off their personal collections for integration into the cumulative data cloud.

Each year, as hurricanes hit U.S. coastlines, scientists study them to improve forecasts critical for saving lives and property. Last year, unmanned aircraft from NASA flew into the biggest storms as part of a project to improve hurricane forecasts by 50 percent over the next 10 years. EARTH Magazine reports in the August issue, three projects in particular - the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program, NASA's 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Project Field Experiment and its replacement, the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel Project - may be responsible for a 20 percent error reduction in the hurricane track and intensity forecasts.

The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) is now accepting advance orders for the Earth Science Week 2013 Toolkit. The Toolkit contains educational materials for all ages that correspond to this year's event theme, "Mapping Our World."