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| The latest news from the Academies
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Dec. 31 -- The National Academy of Engineering released a workshop summary, Engineering Curricula: Understanding the Design Space and Exploiting the Opportunities that focuses on how engineering curricula could be enhanced to better prepare future engineers. Topics discussed include enhancing engineering curricula through instructional technologies, learning experiences grounded in real-world contexts, and personal and professional outcomes resulting from studying engineering.
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Dec. 14 -- Costs of plug-in hybrid electric cars are high and unlikely to decrease drastically in the near future, says a new report from the National Research Council. Subsidies in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars will be needed if plug-ins are to achieve rapid penetration of the U.S. automotive market. Even with these investments, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are not expected to significantly impact oil consumption or carbon emissions before 2030.
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Dec. 14 -- Beginning in January, the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, D.C., will host several public programs and free "science cafés" that explore a wide range of topics including the role of scent in sexual attraction; responses to pandemic outbreaks; indoor air quality; tracing the origin of an outbreak; and more.
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Dec. 3 -- Past controversies over historical temperature trends and access to research data have resurfaced amid a stir over old e-mail exchanges among climate scientists that were stolen from a university in the U.K. Two National Research Council reports in particular address these issues. Guiding principles for maintaining the integrity and accessibility of research data were recommended in a report released earlier this year, and a 2006 report examined how much confidence could be placed in historical surface temperature reconstructions. [more]
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| Breaking stories in science
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Dec. 7 -- Leaders from across the globe convened today in Copenhagen for a United Nations conference to discuss a plan to combat climate change. One of the goals of the summit, which runs through Dec. 18, is to work on a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.
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Dec. 4 -- After four years of collaboration, researchers have nearly completed sequencing the B73 corn genome, cataloging over 32,000 genes (more genes than are in human DNA) and 2.3 billion base nucleotides. Corn is one of the most widely grown grains in the world, and the B73 strain -- one of the most common -- has the largest genetic blueprint discovered for any plant species mapped to date. The completed mapping has implications for developing higher yield, disease resistant, drought resistant, and more nutritious crop strains.
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Nov. 23 -- President Obama today announced a new nationwide effort to create public-private partnerships to improve science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and encourage more students to pursue careers in these fields. The campaign, called Educate to Innovate, will focus on mobilizing resources to help already-successful programs reach more young people and on using media such as video games and television to aid learning in math and science, among other goals.
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Nov. 19 -- Last week, for the first time in four years, a competitor in NASA’s "space elevator" challenge qualified for one of the contest's cash prizes. Part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program, the contest challenges participants to transmit power from a remote transmittor to a device that climbs a cable suspended one kilometer high.
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Nov. 9 -- A new report from the national science academies of seven African countries estimates that the lives of nearly 4 million women, newborns, and children in sub-Saharan Africa could be saved every year if already well-established, affordable health interventions reached 90 percent of families. The report was released at the annual conference of the African Science Academy Development Initiative in Accra, Ghana.
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