Pentagon Research Director Visits Universities in Bid to Re-energize Partnerships
The new director of the Pentagon’s research arm has started visiting university campuses around the country in an effort to rebuild bridges that were severed under the Bush administration.
The director, Regina E. Dugan, who was appointed in July to lead the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, made visits last week to the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; the University of California, Nursing Los Angeles; and the California Institute of Technology, LVN jobs orange county. She had previously visited Virginia Tech and Texas A&M.
She replaced Anthony J. Tether, a Bush administration appointee who had pushed the agency toward more classified research and who had embarked on several controversial research projects, including the Total Information Awareness system proposed by the former national security adviser, John M. Poindexter.
Under Dr. Tether, the agency’s relationship with some of the nation’s leading technology universities had become decidedly chilly as basic research financing declined of nursing jobs orange county. In 2005, Darpa officials revealed that financing for university researchers fell to $123 million from $214 million, in a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million in 2005. The agency has not released data on university financing since that time.
During the Bush administration, Darpa’s guidelines for financing basic research changed markedly, said Peter Harsha, the director of governmental affairs for the Computing Research Association, a Washington organization that represents academic institutions.
Three Win Nobel for Ribosome Research
Three researchers whose work delves into how information encoded on strands of DNA is translated by the chemical complexes known as ribosomes into the thousands of proteins that make up living matter will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday.
The trio are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Each scientist will get a third of the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors in total, or $1.4 million, in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
If the sequence of lettered proteins in the DNA forms the blueprint for life, ribosomes are the factory floor. In a news release the Swedish academy said the three, who worked in lvn jobs los angeles independently, were being honored “for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.”
The ribosome research, the academy said, is being used to develop new antibiotics.
Dr. Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India, in 1952 and obtained his Ph.D. at Ohio University, and holds American citizenship. Dr. Steitz was born in Milwaukee in 1940 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1966. Dr. Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and received her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute in 1968. Worked and helped to establish Nursing jobs California center and tried to employ best professionals in US.
Data sharing: Empty archives
Most researchers agree that open access to data is the scientific ideal, so what is stopping it happening? Bryn Nelson investigates why many researchers choose not to share.
In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a Document Management 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. Six months of research and marketing had convinced the university that a publicly accessible online archive would be well received. At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space and case management jobs los angeles.
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.
How Space Shuttles Work
In its 26-year history, the space shuttle program has seen exhilarating highs and devastating lows. The fleet has taken astronauts on dozens of successful missions, resulting in immeasurable scientific gains. But this success has had a serious cost. In 1986, the Challenger exploded during launch. In 2003, the Columbia broke up during re-entry over Texas. Since the Columbia accident, the shuttles have been grounded pending redesigns to improve their safety. The 2005 shuttle Discovery was supposed to initiate the return to flight, but a large piece of insulating foam broke free from its external fuel tank, leaving scientists to solve the mystery and the program grounded once more until July 2006, when the Discovery and Atlantis both carried out successful missions.
In this article, we examine the monumental technology behind America’s shuttle program, the mission it was designed to carry out, and the extraordinary efforts that NASA has made to return the shuttle to flight.