ASU graduates started the summer off with a bang with a historic Spring Commencement ceremony. Commencement speaker, President Barack Obama, helped draw a crowd of more than 70,000 to Sun Devil Stadium for the May 13 graduation event.

The International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU and an international committee of taxonomists unveiled the top 10 new species described in 2008. Among this year's picks was a tiny seahorse – Hippocampus satomiae – with a standard length of 0.54 inches (13.8 millimeters) and an approximate height of 0.45 inches (11.5 millimeters).

The ASU baseball team won the Tempe Super Regional in June, advancing them to the 2009 College World Series. The Sun Devils ended their season run after a 4-3 loss against Texas, where they tied for third in the series and closed out the season at 51-14 overall.

In a world where more people are using digital technologies to speed through TV commercials, advertisers are looking for other ways to reach a buying audience. ASU professor Michael Wiles has found that the answer may lie in movies. A new study co-authored by Wiles shows that successful product placements in films actually give the featured companies a boost in stock prices.

Professor Brian Sullivan conducts research on a variety of vertebrate species, including toads and the desert spiny lizard he is shown holding in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. Sullivan's work with toads is providing evidence of how human activity can affect the process of species formation. Sullivan is examining hybridization between the Arizona Toad and the Woodhouse’s Toad. His work provides evidence that human activity, such as dam construction, creates habitat changes that lead to hybridization between these two species and in some instances it can lead to the decline or extinction of one of the species.

Researchers, led by ASU geologist L. Paul Knauth, believe that a massive greening of the planet by non-vascular plants, or primitive ground huggers, was the trigger for the Cambrian explosion of life that occurred on Earth roughly 540 million years ago. The carbon isotopes in these layers at the south end of Death Valley, California bear evidence of the first extensive greening.

This summer, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter whose mission is to return to Earth’s Moon to gather crucial data on the lunar environment that will help astronauts prepare for long-duration lunar expeditions. Aboard is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, for which ASU professor Mark Robinson is the principal investigator. Within days of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the camera was able to capture these images of five of the six Apollo sites.

An installation of solar panels covers an ASU parking structure. For the second year in a row, Arizona State University was named one of the nation's "greenest" universities by The Princeton Review in its second annual rating of environmentally friendly institutions. The Princeton Review named 15 colleges to its "2010 Green Rating Honor Roll" – a list that salutes the institutions that received the highest possible score – 99 – in this year's rating tallies.

ASU researcher N.J. Tao has made new discoveries into the fundamental properties of graphene – a super-material poised to transform the electronics and nanotechnology landscape. Tao has described the first direct measurement of a fundamental property of graphene, known as quantum capacitance, using an electrochemical gate method. A better understanding of this crucial variable should prove invaluable to other investigators participating graphene research.

ASU mourned the passing of Walter Cronkite this summer, who died July 17. Cronkite was intimately involved with ASU, as the namesake of the university’s journalism school – The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He often met with students and faculty and would travel to Arizona each year to personally give the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism to a media leader.

Student Brian McCollow visits with members of a Ghanian village as part of ASU’s GlobalResolve program. The program is giving students the opportunity to implement sustainable solutions to directly improve the lives of people in underdeveloped nations throughout the world.

Professor Cun-Zheng Ning shows his nanophotonics laboratory at ASU. His research with laser technology is opening up the possibility to use nanoscale lasers to significantly improve the performance of computers and speed up Internet access.

As part of the introduction of the U.S. Postal Service's Early TV Memories stamp series, Arizona State University was chosen to reveal the Steve Allen stamp in a ceremony at the Hayden Library. Steve Allen, the original host of The Tonight Show,” attended ASU in the mid-1940s and worked at Phoenix radio station KOY-AM early in his career. Before his death in 2000, Allen donated many of his writings, awards and other memorabilia to the Special Collections at the ASU Libraries.

Researchers, including three from the Institute of Human Origins at ASU, have found evidence that early modern humans living on the coast of Africa employed pyrotechnology in their stone tool manufacturing process. Unheated silcrete (left) can show dramatic changes in color and texture after heating and flaking (right).