The Chronicle of Higher Education: Late Monday night Congress’s Democratic leadership proposed a spending bill for the rest of the 2007 fiscal year that would provide comparatively large increases for the maximum Pell Grant award and for physical-sciences and biomedical research.
The Christian Science Monitor: A new report claims that the Bush administration has suppressed scientists’ climate-change work.
Cern Courier: Physicists met in Uppsala to consider how the next generation of high-energy neutrino detectors can contribute to new physics as well as to study cosmic phenomena.
MSNBC: Seismic activity is tearing Africa apart and scientists are geared up to watch the ripping landscape in an unprecedented set of observations.
USA Today: The Advanced Camera for Surveys instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope has failed and can’t be fully repaired, NASA officials said Monday. The camera was installed on the HST in 2002 and is scheduled to be replaced in the 2008 service mission.
“Obviously we’re very disappointed,” said Hubble program manager Preston Burch. The lost instrument “was the newest camera, the highest-tech instrument and … the most heavily in demand.” Two-thirds of the most recent proposals for use of Hubble required the advanced camera, he said.
New York Times: Scientists from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are expected to conclude later this week in a new IGPCC report that there is at least a 90 percent chance that human-caused emissions are the main factor in warming since 1950.
European Design Engineer: Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, led by Shuji Nakamura–who invented the blue laser–have achieved lasing operation in nonpolar gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors and demonstrated the world’s first nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes.
NPR (audio): Only 30 percent of Iraq’s university students are currently attending classes — the lowest level since U.S. troops invaded Iraq four years ago. The universities, which are directly linked to Iraq’s future, are on the verge of collapse.
The Boston Globe: Intel Corp. is set to capitalize on a new breakthrough in microchip technology more quickly than its rival AMD, but analysts say the advantage will only be temporary.
ScienceNow: Hurricanes, healthy fisheries, and rapid climate change are among the top priorities in an ocean research plan released here today by the White House. At the same, the Bush Administration announced it plans to ask for $143 million in new funds for ocean research and conservation in next month’s 2008 budget request to Congress. “It’s a good day for ocean science,” says Shirley Pomponi, President and CEO of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Florida.