Carlson participating in field work on the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt, Canada, Summer 2009.

Rick Carlson was elected vice-president of the Geochemical Society in December. Following his two-year term in this position, he will go on to serve as president of the society for two more, and past-president for the final two years. As vice president, Carlson will be responsible for appointing committee positions within the society and will serve on the Goldschmidt forum of the society’s annual Goldschmidt meeting. While president, Carlson will continue his participation with the Goldschmidt forum while also leading the society's Board of Directors and serving on the Joint Publications Committee and the Geochemical Fellows Selection Committee. As Past-President, Carlson will provide corporate memory to the organization.

Carnegie Fellow Guillem Anglada, along with colleagues from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, has discovered a new extrasolar planet around the very active young star BD+20 1790. The star is an orange K5V, slightly less massive than the Sun, and has unusually high levels of activity, displaying recurrent flares and evidence of large protuberances extending several stellar radii from its surface. The group detected the planet via the spectroscopic method, by measuring the Doppler shift on the star induced by an orbiting low-mass companion. BD+20 1790 is estimated to be between 20 and 60 million years old—the youngest main-sequence star with a candidate planetary companion.