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Physics Today: Earlier this week Alan Taub became the new vice president of Research and Development for General Motors. Despite going into and out of bankruptcy, GM is still one of the largest companies in the US that conducts industrial R&D.

Taub (see left image) has run GM's eight science labs for the last nine years and was a key player in building GM's newest R&D lab in Shanghai that officially opened last month.

In his new role, Taub will still coordinate all the advanced technical work within GM, but will be more closely involved in managing GM's collaborative R&D ventures with academia, the Department of Energy, and other strategic partners.

Physics Today Online was lucky enough to ask some questions in a public webcast held on Tuesday. An edited transcript is below.

[Question]: What is the future of fuel cells within the new GM, do we have enough funds to run them?

Taub: Fuel cells are still an important activity for General Motors. And part of the solution to diversifying the energy source for vehicles. We remain committed to developing the technology but as we approach early commercialization, the costs of development are increasing.

[Question]: How do you envision the global R&D organizations work together? How will "who does what" be determined?

Taub: Working with my leadership team, we select the competencies to be developed at each of the eight R&D labs'. Multidisciplinary teams then integrate the labs programs globally to gain the most effective results. The competency selection for each site is based on availability of talent.

[Question]: Why do you believe globalization of GM's R&D activities is necessary?

Taub: Innovation and breakthrough research are enabled by diversity—diversity of education, the working environment and the local marketplace. We have been successful at having researchers located in different sites globally and bringing their ideas together so the team has more perspectives for new ideas.

[Question]: The easiest way to improve fuel efficiency is to cut down on weight. The New York Times had an article on how 60% of the weight of a car is due to steel, and how new types of steel are going into cars to provide safety and lightness. What is GM doing in this area, do you do the basic R&D yourself or do you rely on your partners?

Taub: In the past 15 years, we have dramatically changed the [steel] material mix on vehicles. For example, GM is increasing it's usage of high-strength steels to the point that in the next 10 years we will see very little low-carbon steel in the structural bodies of GM vehicles.

As well as changing the steel mix, GM is also increasing usage of aluminum and magnesium. This is accomplished by collaborations of GM and supplier engineers as well as precompetitive research with Ford and Chrysler in US.

[Question]: Battery technology seems to have significant limitations. Is GM looking at ultra-capacitors as well?

Taub: Yes, we are looking at batteries, fuel cells and ultracapacitors as energy storage devices. We see a role for each.

[Question]
Will you use the plugin technology from the canceled Saturn Vue "two-mode" hybrid in any other small SUVs in the future?

Taub: All we said so far is that the technology will go into another GM product. Stay tuned.

[Question]: To succeed, GM needs world class scientists. After bankruptcy, how does it propose to attract and retain them?

Taub: We have been successful at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to the various GM global laboratories. People are intrigued by the combination of deep technical assignments on products that make a difference to consumers everywhere.

[Question]: We've seen impressive demos on Vehicle to Vehicle communications technology from GM. What are the remaining obstacles to introducing this technology into the marketplace?

Taub: We are continuing "harden" the technology in order to enable commercialization. Because this is a safety-related technology, it must be robust. It also requires standards for all of GM's suppliers since the vehicle parts needs to interact. There is progress being made on all fronts.

[Question]: What do you see as the biggest challenge in transitioning to wide-spread electric vehicle use?

Taub: Two things. Getting the cost down and the supply base ready.

[Question]: What is your personal favorite research topic at the moment?

Taub: Clearly, it is the electrification of the vehicle. Batteries, motors, hydrogen fuel cells are dominating the research portfolio. At the same time, the connected vehicle (e.g. navigation, OnStar, infotainment) is probably the most fun because we get to implement it at consumer electronics speed.

[Question]: Do you envision GM R&D researchers doing fundamental researchers? Or do you see the researchers act as project managers, and the universities act as the actual researchers?

Taub: The answer is both. Inside GM, we have the world's best individual contributors performing leading edge research on critical automotive applications. They do their work inside our walls while collaborating with the best professors and engineers in universities and national labs.

[Question]: Can you speak to GM's R&D center in Honeoye Falls, New York, the role its played so far, and the type of role it might play moving forward?

Taub: Honeoye Falls is the site of one of our eight global laboratories. It is our main site for fuel cell stack research and more recently battery system research. It will continue to be an important element of our research infrastructure.

[Question]: How's that shape-changing NiTinol material coming along. Any production plans on the horizon?

Taub: Our first application is being deployed as we speak. I just can't tell you at this time what that vehicle is.

[Question]: I wonder what makes fuel cells expensive? It seems very affordable for a new technology. If a fuel cell car has 100 grams of platinum, which is about $3000-4000, the rest of the materials involved is not that much expensive.

Taub: There are many elements that contribute to the cost of vehicle components. Raw material is only one aspect. On the fuel cell stack, our next-generation technology dramatically reduces the platinum loading, making it competitive with that on after-treatment for internal combustion engines.

[Question]: What is the research focus of the science lab in China?

Taub: Glad you asked. I am just back from Shanghai and the jet lag is almost gone. The initial areas of attention are improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines, lightweight materials and the joining technology for those materials, emerging market safety, consumer research methodologies and batteries.

[Question]: How far into the future do think it will be before we see automated cars driving on the expressway?

Taub: I'm on the record for promising limited autonomy driving on highways by 2015. This is enabled by a combination of lane keeping and stop-and-go adaptive cruise control.

[Question]: How does GM R&D foster a culture of innovation and creativity while simultaneously having researchers be accountable for their work and in tune with the overall cost of their projects?

Taub: Welcome to the challenge of leading an industrial research laboratory. We pull on our researchers to solve the tough problems facing the industry while adding to the world's scientific knowledge base. We lead the industry in patents—we filed more than 600 within R&D alone last year—and lead in technology implementation in the product.

[Question]: In your introduction you talked about "mainstreaming R&D." What does this mean and is GM allowing other employees to contribute ideas?

Taub: R&D is now fully integrated into Product Development at GM. That is allowing us to get more streamlined in our technology development and implementation activities. We are always looking for good ideas from both inside and outside the company. Feel free to contact any of our group managers, lab directors or me if you don't know who else to email.

[Question]: The development of the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles requires advancements and a deep understanding across a wide range of materials (electrode materials for batteries, catalysts for fuel cells). How do you draw the line between what GM can develop and what must be developed by others to make a particular technology successful? Basically how deep into basic research does GM want to go?

Taub: The make-buy decision is different for every technology. For example, stamping of metals for the key components of the vehicle is a core technology within GM. The plastic parts are generally purchased from suppliers. The recent decision to vertically integrated into battery pack manufacturing does not mean we would be manufacturing our own battery cells. However, we are working internally on next-generation cell technology in collaboration with various suppliers.

Nature News: In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores—just about any kind of digital data the university's investigators could produce.

At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space.

Six years later, the US$200,000 repository lies mostly empty.

Researchers had been very supportive of the archive idea, recalls Susan Gibbons, vice-provost and dean of the university's River Campus Libraries—especially as the alternative was to keep on scattering their data and dissertations across an ever-proliferating array of unintegrated computers and websites.

"So we spent all this money, we spent all this time, we got the software up and running, and then we said, 'OK, here it is. We're ready. Give us your stuff'," she says. "And that's where we hit the wall." When the time came, scientists couldn't find their data, or didn't understand how to use the archive, or lamented that they just didn't have any more hours left in the day to spend on this business.

A similar reality check has greeted other data-sharing efforts.

Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing. It opens up observations to independent scrutiny, fosters new collaborations and encourages further discoveries in old data sets.

But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers' concerns. What will keep work from being scooped, poached or misused? What rights will the scientists have to relinquish? Where will they get the hours and money to find and format everything?

NYTimes.com: In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.

The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.

guardian.co.uk: Harvard and Yale universities lost 30% of the value of their endowments in the last year due to the financial crisis.

Harvard's endowment dropped by $11billion to $26 billion in the year to the end of June, according to the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the endowment. Excluding donations and distributions, the decline in investment performance amounted to 27.3%, the biggest in four decades.

The losses have forced the university to lay off 275 staff and halt plans for a campus expansion across the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Yale's endowment fell by $7 billion to $16 billion over the same period.

"We want to alert you to the fact that another round of reductions will be necessary," Yale's president, Richard Levin, wrote in a letter to the Yale community.

This means that Yale will have an annual deficit of $150 million from 2010–11 to 2013–14, he wrote. He said the school would cut non-salary expenses by another 5% this year, having already reduced staff and non-salary expenses by 7.5%.

Nature: After decades of neglect, in 2002 Pakistan set out to dramatically reform its higher-education system. The reforms were designed to reverse years of chronic underfunding, to invest in the academic workforce and to revitalize a moribund research enterprise. This ambitious agenda generated immense public interest and controversy. Although it is too early to judge the outcome of the experiment, it is already clear that some initiatives were more successful than others say Athar Osama and colleagues in Nature.

I, Cringely: Information technology reporter Robert X. Cringely asks why academic education hasn't faced the price drops other industries connected to IT have faced:

MIT has all its lectures available for viewing for free over the Internet. Why hasn't some entrepreneur yet leveraged this amazing act of generosity? Some little school could outsource its entire physics department, for example, using MIT lectures and a single professor in-house. My physics department had only 2.5 professors (the .5 was the department chair who drove a cab on the side) and we didn't have the benefit of MIT video.

There is enough good material available for free online right now that it would be easy to create a virtual university (WikiVersity?) with the only thing missing being the granting of degrees. It's that whole "degree from MIT" thing that allows that school not to worry about sharing its lecture bounty, because in the education system lectures are viewed as worthless unless they lead to a degree.

Why is that?

Naturejobs: Scientists, postdocs, and students planning to travel to the US to work or study need two things before applying for a visa: time and patience.

Despite recent efforts by federal agencies to improve and accelerate the visa-application process—including adding staff and setting shorter waiting times—it still needs legislative and regulatory reform, say those who are familiar with the system. Many consider it to be a labyrinthine muddle of requirements and regulations. Delays of up to half a year are not uncommon, even with the processing improvements brought in to clear the backlog and speed procedures after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 forced a visa clampdown.

csmonitor.com: Children born since the dawn of the Internet Age probably wouldn't think twice about learning online. They might just as soon read a Shakespeare sonnet on Twitter as hear it live from a teacher in a classroom.

And yet the educational establishment still debates whether e-learning (aka "virtual schooling" or "distance education") can be as good as traditional in-person teaching in a campus setting. Jokes are still being made about successful e-schools, such as the University of Phoenix, as being "diploma mills."

Now the results of a recent federal study should help "log out" of that tired debate. The study, released by the US Department of Education, found that many types of online education for a college degree are better at raising student achievement than face-to-face teaching is.

CNN.com: American children aren't necessarily getting smarter or dumber, but that might not be good enough to compete globally, according to numbers cited by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

He noted a special analysis put out by the National Center for Education Statistics that compares 15-year-old US students with students from other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The report says that it found US students placed below average in math and science, and that 16 of the 29 other participating OECD member countries outperformed their US peers in terms of average scores.

The Observer: A UK parliamentary inquiry from the Commons select committee on innovation, universities, science and skills has revealed that the number of first-class degrees had almost doubled in a decade at British universities.

Different universities demand "different levels of effort" from students to get similar degrees, according to the report, suggesting that top grades from some colleges were not worth the same as others.

The report calls for the watchdog overseeing standards in universities to be radically overhauled or scrapped and new guides set for degree marking, noting that while 53% of students achieved a first or 2:1 in 1997, that had risen by last year to 61%.

Universities claimed that standards must be high because colleges remained popular with overseas students, but the committee said it was "absurd and disreputable" to justify academic prowess in that way. Phil Willis, chair of the committee, said it was "extremely concerned that inconsistency in standards is rife."

NPR: When you hear the name Oppenheimer, you probably think of Robert, the father of the atomic bomb. But there was also another physicist in the Oppenheimer family: Robert's younger brother, Frank.

The younger, perhaps less-known Oppenheimer is the subject of a new book by science writer K.C. Cole. In its pages, the enigmatic Frank Oppenheimer comes to life: the physicist and tinkerer, the chain smoker who kept a little bottle of whiskey in his desk, the pacifist who also worked on the atom bomb, the genial, smiling man with a sometimes unpredictable temper. But above all, you may know him best for his most lasting gift to society: the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the wonderful hands-on science center that he founded.

Ira Flatow talks to Cole about Frank Oppenheimer on NPR.

Related Link
Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up

CNET News: Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates has managed to fulfill a personal dream of taking some classic physics lectures and making them available free over the Web.

The lectures, done in 1964 by noted scientist (and Manhattan Project collaborator) Richard Feynman, take notions such as gravity and explain how they work and the broad implications they have in understanding the ways of the universe.

Tapping his colleagues in Redmond to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collection available free from the Microsoft Research Web site.

Gates said that he hoped his action would serve as a model for taking great educational content and making it broadly available for free.

Salon.com: The experience of CERN in having to counter widespread but baseless public concerns about black holes consuming the Earth is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today, say Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Science is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent—an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions.

As science-fiction film director James Cameron (Aliens, Terminator, Titanic) has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists "as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains."

That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture—no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases, and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics.

To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science—heavily influenced by politics and mass media—and that's a very different matter.

Guardian.co.uk: As concerns increase in the UK about the "dumbing down" of science education, the government has launched a consultation on the new GCSE science curriculum. Unfortunately the consultation process is happening when nearly all the teachers are on holiday.

As Alom Shaha, a science teacher and filmmaker, says on the Guardian's website:

There are not enough students going on to study science at A-level. Top universities are complaining about the low standard of the few students who do choose to study science beyond school. There's a shortage of good science teachers.

These factors combine to create a crisis that has damaging implications for the future of British science and the economy. The QCA consultation is an opportunity for science teachers to play a role in improving things and I think as many science teachers as possible should take part.

In that regard Shaha has created a website www.howscience.co.uk to make an easier way for teachers and interested parents to contribute to the consultation.

Nature News: Indian universities are likely to find themselves under a new oversight body, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has announced.

Physicist Yash Pal led the committee that recommended setting up a six-member National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) to reform higher education. The commission would replace nearly a dozen regulatory bodies and bring all streams of higher education, including engineering, medicine, agriculture, and law, under its purview.

Nature News: With its electron microscope, genetic sequencing machines, and observatory, the Yokohama Science Frontier High School is equipped like no other. Will future scientists be inspired there, asks David Cyranoski.

Science: How will the US find the talent to fuel its clean-energy economy? Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has a solution—a 10-year, $1.7 billion education program called RE-ENERGYSE (REgaining our ENERGY Science and Engineering Edge)—and the physics Nobelist says there's no time to waste. But Congress may prefer to wait until next year.

Times Higher Education: The use of citations to determine the quality of academic work in the hard sciences is to be abandoned in favour of peer review in the new system being designed to replace the research assessment exercise.

However, information about the number of citations a scholar's work accrues could be provided to assessment panels to help "inform" their judgments in a range of subjects.

At a conference on the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) this week, the Higher Education Funding Council for England sketched out how it intends to assess the quality of research outputs in the system, which will determine the allocation of $2.9 billion of annual research funding from 2014.

"We just don't think bibliometrics are sufficiently mature at this stage to be used in a formulaic way or, indeed, to replace expert review," said Graeme Rosenberg, Hefce's REF project manager. "However, there is still scope for bibliometrics to inform the assessment process."

New York Times: The prospects for women who are scientists and engineers at major research universities have improved, although women continue to face inequalities in salary and access to some other resources, a panel of the National Research Council concludes in a new report.

Walking Randomly: Back in 1997 Mike Croucher was a second-year undergraduate of physics. He was taught how to program in Fortran, a language that has survived over 40 years due to several facts including

• It is very good at what it does.


• There are millions of lines of legacy code still being used in the wild. If you end up doing research in subjects such as chemistry, physics, or engineering then you will almost certainly bump into Fortran code.


• A beginner's course in Fortran has been part of the staple diet in degrees in physics, chemistry, and various engineering disciplines (among others) for decades.


• It constantly reinvents itself to include new features. Croucher was taught Fortran 77 (despite it being 1997) but you can now also have your pick of Fortran 90, 95, 2003, and soon 2008.

"Almost everyone I knew hated that 1997 Fortran course and the reasons for the hatred essentially boiled down to one of two points depending on your past experience," he says.

• Fortran was too hard! So much work for such small gains. (First-time programmers)


• The course was far too easy. It was just a matter of learning Fortran syntax and blitzing through the exercises. (people with prior experience)

The course was followed by a numerical methods course which culminated in a set of projects that had to be solved in Fortran. People hated the follow-on course for one of two reasons

• They didn't have a clue what was going on in the first course and now they were completely lost.


• The problems given were very dull and could be solved too easily. In Excel! Fortran was then used to pass the course.

Croucher continues, "Fast forward to 2009 and I see that Fortran is still being taught to many undergraduates all over the world as their first ever introduction to programming."

"Students can solve problems infinitely more complicated then the ones I was faced with in even my most advanced Fortran courses with just a couple of lines of code using Mathematica, Maple, or MATLAB."

"Which suggests why learn Fortran at all? And would another language such as Python be a better fit for students?"

Related Link
Walking Randomly

USA Today: Carl Franzblau, professor and chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at Boston University Medical School, wanted to expose more young people to science. Then, he says, he had a vision, inspired by a bloodmobile.

The result — mobile science laboratories that bring science education to students—is expanding across the USA.

Mobile labs are active in at least 10 states and are an important tool in attracting young people to the so-called STEM courses—science, technology, engineering and math, Franzblau says.

The labs are buses or semis outfitted with the basics of science education: electricity, distilled water, freezers and refrigerators, scales, microscopes and even computer systems in some cases, he adds.

They are designed to travel to schools that don't have the resources to teach modern science to students, but they also are crucial in providing training to teachers in a field that can see a new discovery change curriculums overnight.

BBC NEWS: Half of England's comprehensives—a type of school that provides the majority of middle-to-high school education in England—did not offer physics, chemistry, and biology GCSEs last year.

In two regions—Islington and Slough—not a single pupil studied the separate sciences.

GCSEs are taken by all high school students in the UK around the age of 16. Pupils have to make a decision when they are 14 over which GCSE subjects to study.

In the new curriculum introduced last year, most schools do a core science GCSE with "additional science" for those who are interested.

Separate or "triple" science GCSEs have largely become the preserve of grammar schools and private schools.

The lack of specific GCSEs is having an affect on the next level of exams taken by students at 17 to 18 years old, and university lecturers worry that it will impact the level of knowledge students have when they start earning science degrees at university.

In a separate story BBC Education Editor Gary Eason says that in a lecture in February this year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he wanted to double the number of pupils in state schools taking triple science to 100,000 a year, by 2014, but although students are entitled to be offered three GCSEs in the sciences—physics, chemistry, and biology—there is no legal requirement for schools to offer courses.

NPR: Students are counting down the days until the start of summer vacation, but is there a way to convince kids to do math over the break? Ira Flatow talks with Danica McKellar, Wonder Years actress turned math book author, about sharpening students' math skills.

Science: The fundamental rationale for the tenure system has been to promote the long-term development of new ideas and to challenge students' thinking says Dan Clawson from the University of Massachussetts Amherst, Amherst, MA. Proponents argued more than 60 years ago that tenure is needed to provide faculty the freedom to pursue long-term risky research agendas and to challenge conventional wisdom. Those arguments are still being made today and are still valid.

However, a 30-year trend toward privatization is creating a pseudo–market environment within public universities that marginalizes the tenure system. A pseudo–market environment is one in which no actual market is possible, but market-like mechanisms (such as benchmarking and rankings based on research dollars, student evaluations, or similar attributes) are used to approximate a market.

BBC NEWS: Boys outperform girls in school science in the UK more than in any other developed country, says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's new study of 15-year-olds from 57 countries. Surprisingly, the gender gap was the other way round in Turkey and Greece.

Slate: Five months ago, Sheri Sangji, a young technician in a biochemistry laboratory at the University of California-Los Angeles began to transfer a tablespoon of t-butyl lithium from one container to another. T-butyl lithium is pyrophoric, meaning it ignites on contact with air, but Sheri Sangji wasn't wearing a protective lab coat--instead, she had on a flammable synthetic sweatshirt. Somehow the stuff spilled onto her clothing, and she was engulfed in flames. Sangji died from her burns 18 days later.

According to a recently completed government investigation, the fire could have been foreseen. UCLA's own safety officials had already faulted the lab on the latter issue back in October, but the problem went uncorrected.

James Kaufman, president of the Laboratory Safety Institute in Natick, Mass., estimates that accidents and injuries occur hundreds of times more frequently in academic labs than in industrial ones.

The presence of flagrant safety violations at a major research university is no surprise, says Slate's Beryl Lieff Benderly.

Since what counts in academia is publishing papers and winning grants, any change will have to start with the people who control the research money, says Benderly. Federal funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation should treat the welfare of the students, postdocs, and technicians who do the labor of American science with the same attention they afford experimental subjects and laboratory animals.

Related Physics Today article
After Serious Accident, SLAC Experiments Remain Shut Down and DOE Report Faults Lab's Safety Oversight (February 2005)

Six weeks later, with 70% of its staff homeless, the 23,000-student university is starting to work again--in tents or in buildings loaned by other towns. The underground particle-physics laboratory at Gran Sasso, which remained undamaged 15 kilometers from L'Aquila, resumed work on 4 May, even though 90% of its staff are homeless.

The L'Aquila physics faculty found a relatively easy solution by moving into the above-ground facilities of the Gran Sasso laboratories, where many homeless staff also sleep. "Of course there will be crowding -- and it will be for some years," says Gran Sasso director Eugenio Coccia. "But we are glad to be able to have such a role.

It has not been easy to find the mental energy to think about science in the circumstances, admits Gran Sasso physicist Francesco Arneodo. "With so many homeless it is hard to focus your full attention on research," he says, the strain clear on his face. "But now it is OK—we are back!"

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Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps (read more).

Today, claims the thinktank Civitas in a collection of essays published to mark the 50th anniversary of Snow's lecture, we face a far worse crisis than the one Snow outlined. In the end, he was talking about a difference in tone and style among groups of highly educated people. Now, say the authors of From Two Cultures to No Culture, the very survival of serious education is at stake.

Focusing on basic healthcare and primary education is stopping Africa developing, Professor Turok suggests.

The founder of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) says investment in higher education is key.

And yet, Oxford's particle physics department has not awarded her a research council grant for her studies. Instead, the grant has gone to a British student, as has been the case for the last four years, give or take the few times when British students have turned down places at Oxford.

Meanwhile, Doglioni has spent months trying to secure funds from charities and other sources to see her through her PhD - months that the 24-year-old Italian could have been spending on her research into why we are made of matter.

This year - her first - Rotary International has funded her fees and the majority of her living expenses. Next year, she has secured an Oxford University scholarship to cover her costs. But she has no idea yet how she is going to fund her third year. "You have to prepare yourself for a graceful fall," she says.

It's a situation Huffman deeply regrets, but can do little about. Research councils - non-departmental governmental bodies that fund thousands of PhDs every year - stipulate that only UK PhD students can receive a grant that covers their living expenses as well as their tuition fees. PhD students from the EU, like Doglioni, are only entitled to a grant that covers their tuition fees.

Vincenzo Raimo, director of the international office of the University of Nottingham, says: "If the UK is prioritising research, particularly in maths and science, which we claim to be doing, we ought to be getting the best people irrespective of where they come from. It would also make us much more competitive.A pool of excellent students from the EU may be going elsewhere because they cannot afford to live and study for a PhD in the UK.

Education is one of the most important topics to Americans. As a nation we devote huge resources to educating our children, local school boards and state government last year spent over $800 billion on education. At the federal level, the Department of Education's budget last year was just over $57 billion. This represents substantially more money than the nation spent on national defense in all its aspects including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, national intelligence, and the department of homeland security.

In fact, the national average secondary schooling expenditure per child in the United States is third in the world, behind only Switzerland and Finland and well ahead of Germany, Japan, South Korea, and China.

Yet, by all objective measures, American students are significantly lagging in almost every area to their foreign counterparts. Math, Science, even language testing scores lag significantly behind other modern industrialized nations.

Equally troubling is the decline in college graduates in engineering, mathematics, and science.

During the 20th century, there were two significant periods of growth in the training of American engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. The first was World War II and its immediate aftermath. Certainly we would rather not expand our capability based on a war, and the circumstances of the GI bill may not be applicable. The other period of expansion was shortly after Sputnik and the decline started with the end of Apollo. Is there a lesson here?

If you really want students to learn, they must be interested; more than that students must be excited, they must be inspired.

We need inspiration, [and] what NASA has provided in the past, NASA can provide again: inspiration.

Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists since he came to the US at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory.

Among Dyson's gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.

Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate.

Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."

The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.

The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.

Included among the approved projects are the following:

• $150 million to accelerate ongoing construction on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York.

• $123 million for major construction, modernization, and needed decommissioning of laboratory facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

• $65 million to accelerate construction of the 12-Billion Electron Volt Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) in Newport News, Virginia.

• $277 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, to be awarded on a competitive basis to universities and DOE National Laboratories across the country. These centers will accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid-state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.

• $90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and PhD scientists across the nation.

• $69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation.

• $330 million for operations and equipment at Office of Science major scientific user facilities, including ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source; the Nanoscale Science Research Centers, located at five national laboratories nationwide; the ARM Climate Research Facility; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory; and Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL).

In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.

Related Links
Further information

It is a dire scene being echoed at campuses across the United States as public universities struggle through the annual legislative budget processes in the worsening economic downturn. Private universities are facing their own challenges, including plummeting endowments1 and shrinking philanthropic gifts. The problem for public universities (see graphic), though, is especially acute in the sunbelt states such as Arizona, where the burst of the housing bubble has hit tax revenues hard and slashed the budgets of universities that, until recently, had ambitious expansion plans.

But burgeoning new economies abroad and flagging prospects in the United States have changed everything. And as opportunities pull immigrants home, the lumbering U.S. immigration bureaucracy helps push them away

Information Week: The increase represents a significant turnaround from a multiyear trend of American students shying away from computer-related degrees.

Dr. Shkumatava, who ended up traveling to Moscow for a visa, is among the several hundred thousand students who need a visa to study in the United States. People at universities and scientific organizations who study the issue say they have heard increasing complaints of visa delays since last fall, particularly for students in science engineering and other technical fields.

A State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that delays of two or three months were common and attributed the problem to "an unfortunate staffing shortage."

The issue matters because American universities rely on foreign students to fill slots in graduate and postdoctoral science and engineering programs. Foreign talent also fuels scientific and technical innovation in American labs. And the United States can no longer assume that this country is everyone's first choice for undergraduate, graduate or postgraduate work.

However, as most community colleges do not have a dedicated Earth sciences department, students will not get an opportunity to get the necessary background or skills to work in this area says reporter Trina Hoaks.

Science: Harvard University hit the brakes last week as it was getting ready to build one of the country's largest new academic science centers--flagging another possible casualty of the economic downturn.

During the Q&A, an audience member asked Tyson about conservative members of the state Board of Education who want to teach the "weaknesses" of the theory of evolution in Texas high school classrooms.

Calling intelligent design theory a "philosophy of ignorance," he argued that a lack of appreciation for basic scienctific principles will hurt America's scientific output, which has been the largest economic engine in the country's history.

"If nonscience works its way into the science classroom, it marks...the beginning of the end of the economic strength this country has known," Tyson said.

The New York Times: A leading scientific group has announced its intention to boycott Louisiana because of a new state law that could open the door to teaching creationism in the public schools.

NatureNews: Nonprofit university presses still seeking science books.

US News & World Report: The Argonaut laments the possibility of 41 academic programs being cut from the University of Idaho lineup in April. One of those programs is the undergraduate physics program. The cuts are part of a strategic plan launched in 2005 to "increase the overall financial and academic efficiency," according to Dean Scott Wood of the college of science

Calling the country’s higher-education system ill-adapted to the challenges of knowledge and growth in the 21st century, Mr. Sarkozy said France trailed other industrialized nations in research and innovation because “too often we have retreated from the necessity of reforming our universities and research institutions.”

The Duke Chronicle Online: As physics departments at a number of top universities are upgrading to provide more interactive learning, officials from Duke's department said they do not expect to make any major changes.

The New York Times: For as long as anyone can remember, introductory physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was taught in a vast windowless amphitheater known by its number, 26-100.

The Mercury News: Stanford University has received $100 million to create a new energy institute where scholars can study everything from solar cells to energy markets and economics.

The Associated Press: The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday chose Michigan State University for a $550 million cutting-edge nuclear physics research facility that could attract top scientists from around the world and boost the state's economy.

The New York Times: American fourth- and eighth-grade students made solid achievement gains in math in recent years and in two states showed spectacular progress, an international survey of student achievement released on Tuesday found. Science performance was flat.

Nature: Multidisciplinary centers with business ties to produce physicists and engineers.

The Washington Post: The average high school physics class in Virginia traverses 2,000 years of thinking, encompassing the Archimedes principle of buoyancy and Newton's laws of motion, and stopping abruptly at about the turn of the 20th century. Educators want the course to advance to today's string theorists and atom-smashing particle physicists.

Whitworthian: A NASA scientist shared the significance and relevance of future US space exploration plans in a lecture to Whitworth students October 30.

BBC: Professor Stephen Hawking is to give up a prestigious academic title.

The New York Times: The United States is failing to develop the math skills of both girls and boys, especially among those who could excel at the highest levels, a new study asserts, and girls who do succeed in the field are almost all immigrants or the daughters of immigrants from countries where mathematics is more highly valued.

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

Craig Barrett, who made his "one political statement" at the Intel developers' forum being held in San Francisco, urged US politicians to act.

He told the audience: "Nations are as strong as their educational systems.

"The rest of the emerging world recognises this is the key to staying competitive."

He went on: "It's time our political leaders acknowledged that and declare there is a crisis and do something about it."

An undercover reporter was told by Leicester University physics department that she was a strong candidate for the money partly because women were “underrepresented” on the course.

The policy, which critics argue is the result of “social engineering”, is evidence of the booming market in cash awards to fill some courses.

Science: Despite ever-rising college costs, a $4.5 billion federal aid program to lure students into science is vastly undersubscribed

Xinhua: Chinese mainland and China's Taiwan won five gold medals each, finishing first at the 39th International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) that ended in Vietnam's Hanoi capital on Monday.

Thanh Nien Daily: Four hundred secondary students from different countries around the world Tuesday took part in the first part of the 39th International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) in Hanoi.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: A campaign by prominent business groups to drastically increase the number of Americans entering engineering, mathematics, the sciences, and technology-related fields is not making nearly as much progress as its leaders had hoped, according to a report released today.

Nature News: The Dutch government has enacted legislation barring Iranian nationals from access to courses and facilities related to nuclear technology.

Under the new law, passed on 4 July, Iranians, including those holding dual citizenship in the Netherlands, will be unable to enrol in graduate-level courses involving nuclear and rocket technologies. These encompass nine subject areas outlined in the legislation, including the technology of reactors for uranium enrichment and the chemistry of rocket fuels. Some students will be allowed to take these courses with a special government waiver, according to Rob Dekker, a spokesman for the Dutch foreign ministry.

BBC: Almost one in four secondary schools in England no longer has any specialist physics teachers, a survey suggests.

Science Progress: Mounting evidence suggests that looming institutional shortcomings are eroding the ability of the so-called “science pipeline” to produce a healthy future national science infrastructure—and unless we shift the traditional paradigm rapidly, the consequences could be dramatic.

Two recent studies underscore this point: One, from the National Institutes of Health, reports that the current generation of young scientists may be turning away from careers in research due to funding issues and the need for institutional change. Concurrently, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ new report, “ARISE: Advancing Research In Science and Engineering,” concludes that early-career researchers face greater challenges today than ever. The continual and grueling search for funding, the Academy suggests, fosters overly conservative decisions about laboratory research directions, which in turn impede the impact of government-funded science and thwart the careers of younger talents.

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) recently looked at the causes and impacts of migration of S&Es, focusing on the impact of the developing world. According to POST many S&Es leave their countries due to low wages, lack of career development, and because of a lack of research funding. There is a net flow of S&Es from developing countries to developed countries.

The net influx is allowing UK universities to continue teaching and conducting research in fields such as chemistry, physics and mathematics, where staff faculty numbers have been falling.

Although India and China lose a high number of S&Es to developed countries, it is a small percentage of the overall skilled population (5%). Countries in sub-Saharan Africa such as Gambia have 60% of their S&E workforce abroad, leading too a significant effect on their education and technology base.

Related Link
International Migration of Scientists and Engineers

USA Today: Convinced that climate change is the biggest challenge people face in the 21st century, Sally Ride, the first american woman in space is on a mission to keep middle school students, particularly girls, interested in science.

The New York Review of Books: Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape says Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

...How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.

The history of books led to a second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era.

The codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.

The fourth great change, electronic communication, took place yesterday, or the day before, depending on how you measure it.

Each change in the technology has transformed the information landscape, and the speed-up has continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.

Says Darnton: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future

[From The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books]

Science: This autumn, 80 top university graduates in this central Asian nation will take part in a revived system of candidate (the Russian equivalent of a Ph.D.) and doctoral degrees in fields as diverse as art history and zoology. If that sounds modest, consider how many students last year began postgraduate studies in Turkmenistan: zero. This is the country's first crop of postgrads since 1997.

Among other signs of progress, construction has begun on a $35 million building for Turkmen State's physics and mathematics faculty, and a new campus is in the works for Turkmen State Medical Institute. The country is looking beyond its borders as well, with plans this fall to dispatch 1500 students to overseas universities, including Columbia University in the US. "If [students] are off-the-charts good, we should do what we can to overcome any obstacles and get them here," says Peter Lu, a physicist at Harvard University, who lectured in Turkmenistan in 2005.

Physics Today Online: In a lecture celebrating NASA's 50th anniversary at George Washington University yesterday, theoretical astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy Hawking, a journalist and book author, argued that an active human spaceflight program is one of the few opportunities for governments to attract students into the sciences.

“The low esteem in which science and scientists are held by the public is a significant problem,” said Stephen Hawking. “Never before has science and technology played such a big role in our lives, and yet the children of today are not interested in science.”

Lucy Hawking followed up on her father’s observation by providing examples of the public's poor grasp of scientific knowledge. She said that “72% of UK students couldn’t identify the Moon from a picture. And only 4% of US adults could name a living scientist, although 96% of those surveyed said it was important for the US to invest in science education.” A large number of scientists were inspired to go into science because of an interest in astronomy; “Kids never tire of hearing about human spaceflight,” she added.

Stephen Hawking pointed out that NASA’s budget forms a small part of the US GNP (gross national product) and that increasing investment in the international space exploration budget by a factor of 20 would still be a small amount (0.25%) of the world’s financial resources. Humanity can afford to battle earthly problems like climate change and still have plenty of resources left over for human spaceflight exploration, he said.

"A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite the space program and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy's Moon target did in the 1960s," Stephen Hawking said. Humans should return to the Moon because it is "close by and relatively easy to reach," and, assuming there are water deposits at the lunar poles, it could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system.

Mars would be "the obvious next target", with its abundant supplies of frozen water and minerals brought close to the surface through volcanic eruptions. "There is also tantalizing possibility that life may have been present there in the past." Saturn’s moon Titan sounds like an intriguing place to visit, he said, although it's cold: “I wouldn’t want to live next to a lake of liquid methane.”

Hawking dismissed robotic missions as a way to inspire the next generation of children because although "robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, they don't catch the public imagination in the same way.”

Although attracting children to science education is one of Hawking’s reasons for supporting NASA’s plans to return to the Moon, he said that human space exploration should be a long-term (200-500 years) strategy for the species, including attempting interstellar travel.

“If only 1% of the 1000 or so stars within 30 light-years of Earth has an Earth-size planet at the right distance from its star for liquid water to exist, that would make for 10 such planets in our solar system's neighborhood,” he said. “If we want the human species to survive another million years, then we need to ‘boldly go where no one has gone before.’”

Hawking also theorized about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, stating that he believed primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. He then joked, "some would say it has yet to occur on Earth."

ORISE: The number of foreign students receiving doctorates in science and engineering from US universities and staying in this country historically has increased. In recent years, however, stay rates peaked and then declined slightly, according to a new report issued by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE).

Stay Rates of Foreign Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities, 2005, documents a study in which tax records were used to estimate the proportion of foreign doctorate recipients from US universities who stayed in the US after graduation for any reason.

"In many fields of science and engineering, foreign students make up the majority of doctorate recipients," says ORISE report author Michael Finn. "Universities, research labs, and other high-tech employers have become dependent on these scientists and engineers."

"However, some of the actions taken to improve security after 9/11 were widely seen as having made it harder for foreign doctorate recipients to obtain visas," Finn said. "Also, there was concern that the increased restrictions made foreign scientists feel less welcome. In addition to security issues, the macroeconomic performance of the US economy may have been a factor as well. There was a weakness from 2000–2002 that may have contributed to the minor decline in the stay rate. This report indicates that the adverse impact on stay rates was quite small—the U.S. is still keeping about two-thirds."

Two-thirds (66 percent) of foreign citizens who received science or engineering doctorates from US universities in 2003 lived in the United States in 2005, the study found. The two-year stay rate had peaked at 71 percent in the early part of this decade; thus, the more recent 66 percent rate represents a slight decline in the stay rate of foreign doctorate recipients.

Among science and engineering disciplines, the highest stay rate was recorded for computer/electrical and electronic engineering. The stay rates in agricultural sciences, economics, and the other social sciences were the lowest, according to the report.

Science: For the last twelve years it has been clear that girls' interest, participation, and achievement in science decline as they advance through the school education system says Sheryl A. Tucker, Deborah L. Hanuscin and Constance J. Bearnes in this week's Science magazine. For example at age 10, the number of girls and boys who like math and science is about the same, but by age 14, twice as many boys as girls show an interest in these subjects.

Many career decisions are influenced at this early age and this interest deficit among girls may contribute to the continuing gender gap in science, particularly in terms of labor market outcomes say the researchers.

The solution could be informal out-of-school workshop programs adds Tucker and colleagues, such as the "Magic of Chemistry" program sponsored by the University of Missouri and the Girl Scouts-Heart of Missouri Council. On average, 81% (range 66 to 88%) of participants wanted, after the workshops, to learn more about science and science careers.

Related links
Magic of Chemistry
Igniting Girls' Interest in Science (Science)

New York Times: A gunman killed five students and wounded 16 others in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall on Thursday afternoon in DeKalb before killing himself, according to university and police officials.

John G. Peters, the president of Northern Illinois University, reported at a news conference that four of the dead were women and two were men. He said four died at the scene, including the gunman, and the other two died at the hospital. All the wounded and the dead were students, including the graduate student leading the ocean sciences class.

The Christian Science Monitor: A Smith College professor's program may provide a pattern for how to attract and keep women engineers.

BBC: Scientists warn that there has been a fall in the proportion of UK students taking science doctorates.

The New York Times: Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

MSNBC: High school students sweep competition, winning $100,000 scholarships

Science: Radical measures from the new president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology are roiling a tradition-bound system.

Science:
A new study concludes that work force data do not support claims of a looming scientific and engineering labor shortage and that test scores indicate U.S. students are doing at least as well in science and math as their international counterparts are.

The real watershed came the next year, however, when Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. President Dwight Eisenhower signed the NDEA into law on September 2, 1958. School reform had been on the table for most of a decade. “Life-adjustment education” was still the fad those days in the nation’s public schools. The professional societies, especially, were poised to act.

What exactly was the $10 billion NDEA? To some, the NDEA was about curriculum reform: the Physical Science Study Committee’s high-school physics course (fifty-six films, a textbook and a slew of novel experiments); various innovative approaches to chemistry; the “new” math (set theory instead of the multiplication tables); the anthropologically-oriented Man: A Course of Study (Bushmen, Eskimos and all that).

In retrospect, however, the real payoff seems to have been the generation of 1958 ­ a cohort of students for whom school became harder immediately, with advanced placement offerings proliferating and much more emphasis on math and science. Their sense of possibility shifted. What the GI bill had been to college education, the NDEA was to graduate study, with an emphasis on science and engineering.....

The Baltimore Examiner: When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.

NPR also looks at the impact of Sputnik on science education in the US.

Science: After U.S. high school students did poorly on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study in 1995, the government has decided not to participate in another version to be given next year.

The Washington Post: Nearly 200 students sat in the large lecture hall, staring down at their professor, Edward F. Redish, holding pencils at the ready to take notes in Fundamentals of Physics. It looked like a traditional lecture course, but appearance is where the tradition ended.

Instead of spending 50 minutes putting students to sleep by lecturing about position, velocity and acceleration, Redish, a University of Maryland professor, kept the students awake by getting them actively involved in the lesson -- all 192 of them.

Los Angeles Times: The Hewlett Foundation donation will create 100 endowed faculty chairs, to counter the exodus of faculty to rich private universities.

Students who enter certain public sector jobs would have their debts erased under the plan, the total cost of which would be offset by slashing government subsidies to lenders. It also calls for a $510-million investment in minority colleges.

Science: Two key science agencies have issued policy directives this month that emphasize the role of investigators in helping postdocs grow into independent researchers.

Iraq is "the closest thing that any of us have seen to the Holocaust in terms of attacks on science and learning", said Allan Goodman, president and chief executive of the non-profit International Institute of Education, which administers the fund.

"It is not even clear who is doing it," said Dr Jarecki, the fund's chairman.

San Francisco Chronicle: Why he's quitting: Dynes says he wants to spend more time with wife of 5 months

The New York Times: Eric Mazur, a professor at Harvard, wants his students to understand concepts, not regurgitate facts.

The Christian Science Monitor: American high-schoolers will test their physics prowess in Iran against teams from 70-plus nations.

"This is the wrong kind of outsourcing," said Ulrich Baur, PhD, a professor of physics at the University at Buffalo (UB) College of Arts and Sciences and a co-founder of the Large Hadron Collider-Theory Initiative (LHC-TI), a consortium of theoretical physicists. Their goal is to train more US graduate students in theoretical high-energy particle physics calculations relevant to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator being built near Geneva, Switzerland.

"We are behind the Europeans, and we believe very strongly that we shouldn't just leave this work to the Europeans," Baur said in a UB statement.

Oak Ridger: The number of college students enrolled in undergraduate health physics programs continues to increase, according to a survey of the 30 U.S. universities with health physics programs conducted by Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.

Nature: Researchers detained on suspicion of 'espionage'

The Washington Post: Higher starting salaries, more rigorous teacher training programs and additional support for first year teachers are just a few of the incentives needed to deal with a projected shortfall of more than 280,000 math and science teachers across the country by 2015, according to a group of business, foundation and higher education leaders.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: The number of foreign students entering graduate programs in science and engineering rose in 2005, the first increase since 2001, a new survey from the National Science Foundation has found. Total graduate enrollments by American citizens in science and engineering hit an all-time high.

The Washington Post: Picture it: The abandoned building at 14th and U turned into an art gallery where graduate art students can learn how to sell and market their art.

This idea brought to you by Paul So, physics professor at George Mason University.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Kiyoshi Kurokawa doesn't mince words. As the Japanese government's first handpicked science adviser, he wants to completely overhaul the country's higher-education system. And he believes he has the passion and -- at a sprightly 70 -- the energy to do it.

The Washington Post: During the school year, 58 teams of American students coupled with students from China, India and Japan tackled technological solutions to global warming. They chatted online, divided jobs based on skill, consulted with advisers, and in the final grueling weeks, wrote a professional business plan.

The New York Times: Three months after it cleared him of research misconduct, Purdue University has begun a new inquiry into a professor who claims to have generated nuclear fusion in a desktop experiment, the university acknowledged yesterday.

MSNBC: The Kansas state Board of Education on Tuesday repealed science guidelines questioning evolution that had made the state an object of ridicule.

Guardian Unlimited: Birmingham, Nottingham and Warwick universities today announced the creation of a joint graduate school for physics.

NPR: Half a million dollars in scholarships for high school science geniuses were announced today in New York City at the Siemens Competition, one of the nation's top science fairs. Seventeen top students competed with research on such topics as blinking stars, sick worms and amorous monkeys. But the winning project, on topology and abstract algebra, may be incomprehensible to anyone without a PhD in math.

Science: Many U.S. educators think that a streamlined science curriculum with fewer topics per grade is a necessary first step toward boosting student achievement

Guardian Unlimited: The University of Reading last night confirmed its controversial decision to close the physics department.

Guardian Unlimited: Funding chiefs today announced an extra £75m to help prop up ailing university science departments.

San Francisco Chronicle: UC Berkeley physics Professor Richard A. Muller finds himself suddenly popular in some surprising corners of the world.

It turns out self-starting students in 35 states and 43 countries have been watching the 90-minute "Physics for Future Presidents" talks he gives every Tuesday and Thursday morning to a packed lecture hall of 300 undergrads on campus. And the list is growing.

BBC: A Rhodes scholarship-type scheme will be set up to attract the world's best scientists to the UK, the government is set to announce.

The Australian: Physicist Deb Kane has seen many prospective scientists steered away by parents who want their children to earn big money.

"I have been sitting at Macquarie University information days with a young person and the parent and very often the young person is mad keen on physics and the parent beside them counsels them that they don't think that's a very good idea," Professor Kane said.

A study this year by Macquarie of enrolments in university science, engineering and technology found that many prospective students were being funnelled into finance careers for their promise of riches.

ScienceNow: U.S. universities foster "a culture that fundamentally discriminates against women," says a report on the status of women in academic science and engineering issued today by the National Academies. Their underrepresentation is "deeply troubling and embarrassing," according to the report, which suggests that institutions should create a body to collect data, set standards, and ultimately monitor compliance to increase the number of women in technical fields.

The Register: One of the world's most important historical records will be made available online for the first time today. All the Royal Society's journals are free for two months and include stone-cold scientific classics going back to 1665 and the foundations of modern inquiry.

ScienceNow: The leading organization for U.S. mathematics teachers today spelled out what's important for students to know at each primary grade level. Officials at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) hope their 40-page document, titled Curriculum Focal Points: A Quest for Coherence, will help change the "mile-wide, inch-deep" approach that they say has left most U.S. students without a solid preparation for higher-level mathematics.

The Guardian: The study of physics in UK schools and universities is spiraling into decline as many teenagers believe it is too difficult, says a report from the University of Buckingham. The number of A-level exam entries in the subject has halved since 1982 and one in four universities which had significant numbers studying physics have stopped teaching the subject since 1994. Even in the 26 top universities with the highest ratings for research, the trend has been downwards. A similar article in the independent asks does it really matter if the number of students studying physics is falling? The newspaper points out that physics contributes a vast amount to the UK economy, with physics-based industries employing over 1.79 million people in the UK and contributing over £130bn in export value to the UK economy. Says Sir Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society, "It is crucial that we get more specialist physics teachers into our classrooms if we are to inspire more young people to study physics at A-level and beyond. Teachers who are both enthused and knowledgeable about their subjects are key to breaking the cycle of decline that physics is experiencing."

The New York Times: In an effort to make Texas a magnet for scientific and medical research, the University of Texas is planning a $2.5 billion program to expand research and teaching in the sciences, including medicine and technology.

Das Spiegel and The Boston Globe: Although Google Earth wasn't initially designed as a scientific tool, many scientists, such as Erik Born, a Danish biologist tracking walruses in the Artic Sea, are finding the program a cheap and effective way of visualizing their tracking data says Manfred Dworschak in Das Spiegel. The tool is also encouraging other GIS mapping software companies improve their software to compete with Google Earth.

Meanwhile, Kim-Mai Cutler of the Boston Globe reports on SIGGRAPH 2006 , a major conference on computer graphics and emerging technologies that is drawing more than 25,000 people to Boston. The Woods Hole insitute is displaying at the conference a refined technique that will allow researchers to create a three-dimensional map of the ocean of vents, shipwrecks, and more easily map the migration patterns of whales. "Until we had good maps, you could have a city the size of Manhattan or Boston sitting on the bottom of the ocean and you'd be hard-pressed to find it," says Dave Gallo, director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. These new techniques will let us, "see a Coke can on the ocean floor."

ScienceNow: Purdue University officials today announced that they have completed a review on controversy swirling around Purdue nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan, the chief proponent of the contentious notion that sound waves can cause bubbles to collapse in a way that yields energy. Contrary to earlier statements by the university, officials now say they have no plans to make the review public or to reveal any potentially forthcoming disciplinary actions. "Specific recommendations of the examination committee and any subsequent steps by the university will be treated as confidential internal matters," said Purdue University Vice President for Research Charles Rutledge in a statement.

Guardian Unlimited: Pro-Israel activists used such hardball tactics during a British faculty union’s debate last month over a proposed boycott of Israeli academics that the effort to defeat the proposal failed, according to an analysis in today’s Guardian. Members of the British union were bombarded with e-mail messages with subject lines like “Subject: Jew Hater!” and bearing obscenity-laden accusations of anti-Semitism for even discussing the proposal, the analysis says.

NPR: A report cited in The New York Times and quoted on the House floor claimed China graduates nine times as many engineers as the U.S. Skeptical, a Duke professor had students check the numbers.

Science: Defying countrywide protests, India's government last week approved a radical expansion of affirmative action programs for helping millions of disadvantaged citizens attend university.

The Boston Globe: Teenage career preferences are a more reliable indicator than mathematical aptitude for predicting which students become scientists, suggesting a flaw in federal education strategies, a University of Virginia study found.

ScienceNow: Britain's largest university union opted to go out with a bang yesterday when it urged its 67,000 members to consider boycotting individuals and institutions "that do not publicly dissociate themselves" from Israel's policies toward Palestinians. Scientific leaders around the world strongly condemned the union's action, which the union's own executive officer had advised against.

The New York TImes: Brent Staples writes about the experiences of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in attracting students to science. According to Staples, despite being generally less well known than the main University of Maryland campus, UMBC is building a significant reputation for remaking science education in America — and in particular, for increasing minority participation, which lags even after decades of federally supported initiatives.

Reuters: The US National Science Foundation opens a new office in Beijing today that could help improve scientific integrity at a time when China's research community has been marred by scandal over a fake computer chip promoted by a scientist at one of its best universities. The NSF's Beijing office aimed to promote collaboration between East Asian and American scientists and monitor scientific developments in the region.

The Christian Science Monitor: A Chinese study found that 60 percent of PhD candidates admitted to plagiarism, bribery.

The Independen: Pupils of Chinese and Indian origin are the most likely to study for a science degree at university, research published today shows.

Network World: Institutions of higher education are up in arms over an FCC ruling on wiretapping they say could cost them billions of dollars in upgrades, expose their networks to more attacks, and jeopardize rights to privacy and freedom of speech.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Industry support for academic research in science and engineering fell for the third straight year in the 2004 fiscal year, according to a new report from the National Science Foundation. The apparent trend marks the first time a sector of academic research support has shown a multiyear decline since the foundation began surveying colleges about their research-and-development expenditures, in 1953.

ScienceNow: The leader of a team hailed for the discovery of an antibiotic peptide has been absolved of wrongdoing by his employer. At a press conference last week, Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, announced that allegations of "scientific fabrication" against Qiu Xiao-Qing are unfounded, according to an investigation by a university expert group.

Yahoo!News: Six teams of high-school physics teachers will test experiments developed by their students aboard NASA's C-9 aircraft, the "Weightless Wonder," early next month. The experiments will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's discoveries.

AZoNano.com: The University of Massachusetts Amherst will host one of the nation’s elite nanotechnology centers, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today, awarding $16 million to establish the Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing. Combined with state matching funds, the investment will accelerate research and production of ultra-tiny devices, creating new manufacturing opportunities and stimulating economic development. The announcement was made at a State House news conference.

PC Magazine: Wireless handset maker Nokia is hoping to speed the process of product innovation through a new research and development effort launched in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Science: The number of women faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge has declined or remained flat in five of its six science departments since 2000, whereas the number of women in other areas, such as engineering and architecture, increased significantly during the same period, according to a report released last week. The findings, say academics researching the issue, underscore the difficulty in removing obstacles for female scientists, despite high-level attention by some deans and administrators.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required): The peer-review process at many academic journals is intended to be blind, meaning that authors do not know who is reviewing their work. But a little-known setting in Microsoft Word has led to the unmasking of some peer reviewers, compromising the anonymity of the process.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Saratov State University, an institution of over 28,000 students nestled along Russia's Volga River, earned top honors Wednesday in an annual event that could fairly be called the Olympics of undergraduate computer science.