The White House has asked the Supreme Court to uphold its healthcare law, inviting a possible high-stakes legal showdown just before the 2012 election.

The administration’s move came after a challenge to the reform from 26 states and small businesses.

The justice department asked the Supreme Court to declare the law’s key provision, requiring everyone to buy health insurance, constitutional.

The legislation extended health coverage to an extra 32 million people.

Passed in 2010, the Affordable Care Act was a long-held dream of Democrats.

Challenge ‘will fail’

The White House’s move on Wednesday followed an August decision by the 11th Circuit appeals court, in Atlanta, that the individual insurance mandate exceeded Congress’ powers.

While the court said the remainder of the law was constitutional, it struck down its core requirement that Americans who can afford it must buy health insurance or pay a penalty from 2014.

The case was brought by 26 Republican attorneys general and governors, and small business owners, who oppose a provision forcing them to cover their employees’ healthcare at a level set by the government.

The justice department said in a statement on Wednesday: “Throughout history, there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed.

“We believe the challenges to the Affordable Care Act – like the one in the 11th Circuit – will also ultimately fail and that the Supreme Court will uphold the law.”

The healthcare law’s Republican opponents want to repeal it in the courts, contending that the government cannot force people to buy health insurance.

But a senior Obama adviser, Stephanie Cutter, argued that such a view was wrong because people who do not buy insurance force taxpayers to subsidise their care when they are taken to emergency rooms.

In a White House blog post, she added: “We don’t let people wait until after they’ve been in a car accident to apply for auto insurance and get reimbursed, and we don’t want to do that with healthcare.”

If the Supreme Court takes the case, as seems inevitable, a ruling would be expected next June, weeks before the nominating conventions in the run-up to November 2012′s presidential elections.

Correspondents say the case would thrust the law – derided by Republicans as “Obamacare” – to the forefront of the election campaign.

Specifically, the plan is to move away from the No Child Left Behind Act, including provisions to circumvent the act’s 2014 deadline for nationwide academic proficiency. Other requirements, such as preparing students for post-high school plans and creating evaluative benchmarks for teachers, are required for the waiver to be accepted.

We at Student Life support this plan. The American education system needs a serious overhaul. As students and soon-to-be graduates, we understand the value of a good education. We would, however, like to propose a few changes that we hope to see.

We realize that testing will never be the best indicator of academic performance. The ability to fill in bubbles on a Scantron does not necessarily indicate critical thinking skills or academic potential. However, as an indicator of performance overall, the tests do have merit and standardized testing is the only way to track student performance on a large scale. But, we believe standardized testing can be improved significantly. One of those improvements can be requiring testing on more subjects.

At Wash. U., pre-meds and English majors alike understand the importance of a solid science-based education. Tests should evaluate basic knowledge of the sciences because with science education comes innovation and global influence. The American Jobs Act will create new science labs in schools across the country, hopefully improving science curriculum and fostering future advances. No Child Left Behind should put the same emphasis on science.

The president consistently says that the U.S. needs to be better at math and science, but No Child Left Behind requires testing only on math and reading. The country would be better served if education funding for school districts was linked to the sciences as well.

While we recognize that widespread change cannot come from the president alone, he can only do so much with an executive order. While his changes will hopefully bring a beneficial change to the law, a real overhaul is needed in Congress to repair our failing schools. The price to really improve our schools can be incredibly daunting, but we have to keep in mind the future payoff. A country with a better-educated populace is more likely to compete, and more likely to grow. As students, we should bear in mind how imperative a good education is not only to individual success, but also to the success of America as a whole. The economy might be the top concern on everyone’s minds in the next election, but if you look past the next five years, the education and the economy are inextricably linked.

Teachers and their supporters gathered near the White House on Saturday afternoon to chant, cheer, and march for a variety of changes they hope to see in public schools—most notably, a 180-degree shift away from standards- and testing-based accountability.

Aside from that message, those who attended the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action in the scalding sun preached everything from boosting support for teachers’ unions, to booting U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, to getting more federal money for low-income schoolchildren. Student poverty was repeatedly cited as the most pressing problem in public schools.

The more than two hours of speeches and hourlong march, along with other related events, were organized by teachers and teacher-educators who say they are fed up with test-driven accountability for schools—and, increasingly, for teachers. Speakers ranged from such prominent education authors as Jonathan Kozol and Diane Ravitch to the actor Matt Damon.

Organizers estimated the size of the crowd at 5,000, but a rough count by Education Week put it closer to 3,000. Before the event, organizers had said they were expecting 5,000 to 10,000 people.

The gathering, according to the organizers, was aimed at sending a message to national and state policymakers about its participants’ disgust with those policies and to highlight their own principles for improving public education. Members have created a series of position papers outlining the loosely organized group’s views on high-stakes testing, equitable school funding, unions and collective bargaining, and changes to curriculum.

For the most part, those aren’t formal policy prescriptions, and no stronger positions emerged from the rally Saturday. However, policy proposals aren’t necessarily among the organizers’ goals.

“What we’re talking about is creating the right conditions, not prescriptive policies,” said Sabrina Stevens Shupe, a former teacher in Denver who has turned full-time activist and was one of the event’s leaders. “There’s no one silver bullet that’s going to save anything,” she added, referring to attempts to craft education reforms over the past 30 years.

Patrick McCarthy, an 11th grade English teacher from Woodstock, Va., said he is tired of devoting weeks of the school year to preparing students for standardized tests. If he had his way, students would instead spend that time writing more, and improving their writing and critical-thinking skills.

“I’m so tired of hearing teachers are the bad guys,” said Mr. McCarthy, who will start his 17th year as a teacher later this year.

The July 30 event appeared to foster a feeling of solidarity among teachers from across the country who say they have felt under attack. Teachers from Central Falls, R.I., where a move for wholesale replacement of the district high school’s staff drew headlines last year, and from Wisconsin, where a new state law curbed collective bargaining rights for most public employees, made a point of attending. However, not everyone present could pretend to be likeminded on every issue.

Raquel Maya, a graduate student studying elementary education at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, said she understands the arguments against merit pay for teachers—a policy measure that many teachers oppose. Her mother is a longtime elementary school teacher who Ms. Maya said has lost some of her passion.

“But you do need accountability” for student achievement, and testing provides that, she said.

The four-day Save Our Schools gathering also attracted hundreds of teachers and parents to American University on July 28-29 for a series of workshops and seminars about fostering activism and engaging parents, among other topics.

Some of the organizers’ methods during their stay in Washington have been unorthodox. On Wednesday, for example, they created an art installation of 50 dolls, each inside its own cardboard box to represent teachers’ feeling of being boxed in, and placed it outside the U.S. Department of Education headquarters. The move earned them an invitation to speak with Secretary Duncan and members of his staff.

However, the organizers rebuffed an overture from the White House. Although they have denounced the No Child Left Behind Act and the Obama administration’s continued emphasis on high-stakes testing, organizers declined an invitation to meet on Friday with Roberto Rodriguez, a White House education adviser. Organizers cited a busy schedule and instead urged members of the administration to observe and join the march.

Kelle Stewart, a 1st grade teacher from Portsmouth, Va., said she attended in part because five years of teaching exclusively in Title I schools had led her to believe the money spent on testing could be put to better use. In addition, she said that not enough teachers and parents are a part of the debate about education reform, and that the Save Our Schools movement is an opportunity to correct that.

“As teachers, this is a chance for us to model appropriate behavior and how to disagree with each other respectfully,” she said. “We want to encourage healthy debate—it only makes for a richer discussion. That’s a democratic guiding principle, and we have a chance to reiterate that to our students.”

She said had it been her choice, the event organizers would have taken up the White House on its meeting invitation.

“We have to compromise,” she said. “We have to work together.”

The movement has also been the subject of criticism, most notably from the Center for Education Reform, a Washington-based advocacy group for charter schools and other forms of school choice. The center took issue with the SOS group’s call for additional federal money for schools but less prescriptive accountability and testing requirements.

The SOS coalition “advocates for the status quo, and reform to them is about money, control, and no high-stakes tests or accountability,” Jeanne Allen, the center’s president, said in a statement. “SOS is about deforming education, not reforming it. They put up the guise that this is for the families and students, but in truth, these groups want to restrict and remove any power parents have in their child’s education.”

Testing Targeted
On Saturday, another art installation set up at the rally involved several tombstones, each inscribed with a message noting the deaths of imagination, creativity, joy, freedom, and critical thinking, among others. The cause of death for all of them? They were killed by high-stakes testing, in the opinion of the organizers.

Mr. Damon, the actor and Academy Award-winning screenwriter, told the crowd that his strengths and talents couldn’t be measured by any test, and that his mother, an early-education professor, had made sure he didn’t take any standardized exams.

“My mom went to the principal and said: ‘It’s stupid. It won’t tell you anything. It will just make him nervous,’ ” he told the star-struck audience. His imagination and love of acting came from the way he was taught, he said.

“None of these qualities that make me who I am can be tested,” Mr. Damon said, then went on to pay tribute to the crowd.

“There are millions of us behind you. Our appreciation for you is deeply felt,” he said. “We love you, and we will always have your back.”

The event also drew the endorsements of others in the entertainment world, including the actor Richard Dreyfuss and the comedian Jon Stewart. Mr. Stewart, who recorded a video aired during Saturday’s rally, joked that he couldn’t attend in person because a dog ate his car.

Events around the country were organized in state capitals to coincide with the march in Washington for those who supported the cause but couldn’t travel so far. Still, marchers in person Saturday included teachers and supporters from at least as far away as California, Idaho, and Texas.

The marchers sported megaphones and signs as they stopped traffic, at one point drawing cheers from protestors who were denouncing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The SOS crowd carried a collection of signs that read “Wisconsin is the canary in the coal mine,” “Build Schools Not Bombs,” and “A Charter School is Not Superman”—the last a dig at the 2010 documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” which many educators have criticized as denigrating regular public schools.

“High-stakes has got to go! Hey-hey! Ho-ho!” some of the crowd chanted.

Support From Unions
The Save Our Schools movement began with a small group of teachers, including former Connecticut teacher Jesse Turner, now the director of the Literacy Center at Central Connecticut State University, who walked from Connecticut to the nation’s capital last August to protest the No Child Left Behind law and the Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s signature school improvement competition.

The Save Our Schools efforts predated actions by state legislatures across the country this spring to curb teachers’ collective bargaining powers and tenure, said Bess Altwerger, a member of the movement’s organizing committee, who hosted a reception for Mr. Turner last summer. The attacks on unions and collective bargaining further galvanized the group, however, and eventually both national teachers’ unions threw their support behind the Save Our Schools effort.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have donated about $25,000 each to the effort, although most of the rest of the donations have come from one-time gifts provided through the Save Our Schools website, according to organizers. Conference organizers estimated that they’d raised over $125,000 in all. After this weekend, they will have to begin fundraising efforts anew to keep their work going.

Another large donation came from Ms. Ravitch, the education historian, who said she contributed $20,000 she won for the 2011 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize. Ms. Ravitch, who co-writes an opinion blog for Education Week; Mr. Kozol, a former teacher who has written extensively about educational inequities; and the educator and school reformer Deborah Meier, who blogs with Ms. Ravitch, were among those who spoke at the July 30 rally as well as during the conference at American University.

The SOS group will wrap up its gathering with a closed-door meeting Sunday, at which participants will try to determine how to keep the momentum from the rally going. Movement organizers haven’t disclosed the meeting’s location, and it is not open to the press.

Elaine Mulligan, a former special education teacher who is now working on a federally funded technical-assistance project in special education, attended even though she is unsure whether the event will have any long-term effect.

But it’s a start, she said, noting that she brought a friend who doesn’t pay attention to education issues.

“I don’t think it will work. I think it’s incremental, and I have to do what I can,” she said. “Maybe [my friend] will tell someone, and maybe they’ll tell someone. I hope that everybody does the same thing.” Via

The 30-year-old shuttle program is ending this summer after two final flights to deliver a Hubble-class science instrument, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, and a year’s worth of supplies to the International Space Station. Though budget uncertainties have kept NASA from moving forward with a follow-on program, the shutdown of the shuttles remains on track.

Competition to house a retired spaceship has been keen. I’m not a gambler, but the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Center is an obvious pick. Why else would Bolden make his announcement here?

The fleet leader, Discovery, which completed its final spaceflight last month, is promised to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which plans to showcase the ship at its Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va. In exchange, the Smithsonian will give up its shuttle prototype, called Enterprise.

So the only real question is who gets the third shuttle and who gets the consolation prize, Enterprise? NASA says 21 institutions submitted proposals. They include the visitor center at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA’s human space flight hub; New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum; the Museum of Flight in Seattle; and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, located outside of Dayton, Ohio.

Bolden, a former astronaut, says the decision is his alone, so it will be interesting to learn the reasoning behind his selection. Houston obviously has the strongest tie to the program, along with Kennedy Space Center in Florida. New York’s got the tourist numbers. And Ohio, well, let’s just say they have politics in their favor. Not only did Pres. Obama’s budget request include $14 million to help the Air Force pay the shuttle’s $28 million travel fee, Ohio is looking like it will be a critical swing state in the 2012 election, which is of obvious interest to Bolden’s boss, President Obama.

Not that anyone’s asked me, but I’m more curious about where NASA sees its future, rather than how and where people can revel in its past. An announcement was expected last week about which firms will get NASA funding to help develop commercial spaceships. When will we know? “Announcement is still TBD,” says NASA.

“We are always going to be sensitive to the response and welfare of our students and make sure they are safe wherever they are in the world,” said Brad Bartel, MTSU provost. “We have reached a point where we urge these students to come home for their own good.”

Suggested by Bartel and fully supported by university President Sidney A. McPhee, MTSU plans to provide funds for airfares of the students who agree to return as soon as they can book a flight.

MTSU students have been attending Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakata, Nagoya Gakuin University, Saitama University, Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka and Tokyo University in Tokyo. Eight of nine students had a year-long commitment.

Rhonda Waller, director of the Education Abroad and Student Exchange Office at MTSU, said eight study-abroad students from Japan at MTSU this semester have indicated their immediate family members are OK. She said her office has been communicating with the MTSU students and their families by phone, e-mail and Facebook.

The move is necessary for safety concerns, according to Michael D. Allen, vice provost for research and dean of the College of Graduate Studies at MTSU.

Allen is a nuclear engineer who spent 12 years of his career studying severe nuclear reactor accidents that produce results similar to what is occurring at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant on Japan’s north-east coast.

“I have performed experiments on all of the phenomena that can occur in a severe nuclear reactor accident, such as hydrogen explosions, steam explosions, melting of the lower head of the reactor pressure vessel, high-pressure melt ejection of molten core debris into the reactor cavity and core concrete interactions,” he said. “In addition, I have melted down a nuclear reactor inside an annular core research reactor to study core relocation and fission product release.”

Allen was tapped for interviews by multiple media outlets around the country, including Fox News, on Thursday.

The U.S. Embassy, earlier this week, at the urging of U.S. scientists warned American citizens in Japan to evacuate a much broader area (50 miles) around the plant than has been requested by Japanese officials (about 12 miles).

Allen, in a Thursday interview with The Daily News Journal, said he would suggest “getting as far away (from the plant) as possible.”
“There is significant potential, if the winds blow in a certain direction, for disaster,” he explained. “If the winds shifted south and blew the radiation towards Tokyo, for example, the impact could be catastrophic and that is the worst-case scenario.”

Scientists in the United States and Japan have said it is likely that any radiation emitting from the plant would be blown out of the area toward the Pacific Ocean by the area’s trade winds, where the radiation would then disperse in the ocean.

Allen agreed and added there’s no risk of any of the radiation reaching the United States.

He expects that officials at nuclear plants around the world will evaluate the need for greater security of diesel generators, especially during disasters.

The destruction of diesel generators at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on Japan’s northeast coast by a tsunami, following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake, led to the dire situation.

“You’ve got to have power at a nuclear power plant to cool the fuel inside,” he said.

According to an investigation by the CDC and New York city and state health officials, a kidney transplant recipient contracted the virus from a donor in an unnamed New York City hospital in 2009. The male donor acknowledged that he had engaged in unprotected sex with another man after he was screened for HIV, but before he donated the organ. The New York hospital tested the donor 79 days before transplant, when he showed no evidence of infection, but did not re-test him closer to the surgery that removed the organ.

The centers’ 1994 guidelines for organ-donor screening, which are being revised, did not address the timing of screening tests.

The CDC is also recommending the use of a test that detects the virus within eight to 10 days of infection.

Of the three major transplant centers serving the city, Mount Sinai Medical Center said the event did not occur there; a spokesman for another, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said, “We don’t have any information about this.” New York University Langone Medical Center said that it would be “inappropriate” to comment.

Thanks to screening of organ donors for HIV, the chance of contracting the virus from a transplant is remote. The CDC estimates the risk of HIV transmission from deceased donors is about one in 25,000 donors, or about one every three years. “This may be happening more frequently than we recognize and we are likely missing cases,” said Matthew J. Kuehnert, director of the CDC’s Office of Blood, Organ, and other Tissue Safety.

The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, a public-private partnership that sets nationalpolicies for organ allocation and screening, and the United Network for Organ Sharing, which operates the system, are formulating a policy for living-donor screening that would keep patients safe without compromising organ availability, said Connie L. Davis, who chairs the panel working on the policy. “People don’t realize how complicated the scheduling and logistics can be for donors who are stepping forward out of the true goodness of their heart.” Dr. Davis said.

Sander Florman, director of the transplant program at Mount Sinai, said the hospital will test its donors as close to transplant as possible in accordance with the new recommendations, and educate donors “to be very careful about any risky behaviors and report them to us confidentially” before donating an organ.

The illness causes uncontrolled shaking, stiffness and slow movement as part of the brain dies.

The small study in The Lancet Neurology used a virus to add genes to brain cells, which resulted in reduced symptoms for half of patients.

Parkinson’s UK welcomed the study, but said further research was needed.

The disease affects 120,000 people in the UK, mostly in the over-50s.

There is no cure, although drugs and deep brain stimulation have been shown to reduce symptoms.

Gene treatment
Patients with Parkinson’s have reduced levels of a chemical – GABA – in part of the brain known as the subthalamic nucleus.

The researchers created a virus which “infects” cells with a gene to increase GABA production.

In the trial, 22 patients had the virus injected into their brains while 23 patients had “sham surgery”, to make them think they had the virus injected.

Their motor function was then scored over six months.

Patients who had gene therapy showed a 23.1% improvement in their motor score, those with sham surgery improved by 12.7%.

The report’s authors say this “offers a novel alternative to conventional pharmacological or surgical treatment” and that it “shows the promise of gene therapy for other neurological disorders.”

Professor Nicholas Mazarakis, who is a specialist in gene therapy at Imperial College London, told the BBC that the positive result was “very encouraging.”

He added: “This result should be taken with some caution though, as it constitutes a rather small mean improvement, only 10.4%, in the clinical rating scale motor scores between those patients receiving the gene therapy and the placebo group.”

In addition the absence of significant improvements in other secondary outcome measures such as dyskinesia and quality of life between the two groups, warrants further long-term evaluation of this treatment in more patients.”

There have been concerns about the safety of gene therapy. In 1999, Jesse Gelsinger died during a trial in the US and there were cases of leukaemia after treatment in France.

The authors say this procedure is safe.

Dr Michelle Gardner, research development manager at Parkinson’s UK, said: “This research shows the promise of gene therapy for neurological conditions like Parkinson’s, but further research is still needed.

“We still don’t know for how long the benefits of this treatment may last, or whether there may be long-term problems due to introducing viruses into the brain.

“In addition, any new treatment must be shown to be more effective than those currently available for Parkinson’s, which this treatment has not yet been shown to do.”

Effective Jan. 1, 2012, new regulations will establish more accountability on the behalf of insurance providers. Because University-sponsored insurance is mandatory for students, these new regulations will not affect students’ ability to obtain health insurance coverage.

In smaller ways, students may experience some benefits.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, insurance companies will not be allowed to levy lifetime coverage limits on student health plans, drop students’ coverage when a student becomes ill but has an error on an application, or deny coverage to students who are younger than 19 and have pre-existing conditions.

Before the health care law was enacted, many students were covered only under their parents’ plans until they were 21 years old, but the new act allows them to stay on until age 26. This means Washington University students will be able to use their parents’ insurance as secondary coverage in addition to the University-sponsored plan.

Virginia Wells, director of the health center at the College of William & Mary, a public university in Williamsburg, Va., attested to the health care law’s measurable benefits.

“When students require hospitalization or specialty care away from the confines of the University Health Center, their parents’ health plan becomes their secondary coverage, which helps offset the charges which may have exceeded the limits of their primary plan,” Wells said. “Before the affordable health care act, undergraduate and graduate students over the age of 21 would not have the option of this secondary coverage.”

Nearly 3 million college students participate in university-sponsored health plans across the country, according to recent studies, and more than 2,000 colleges and universities collaborate with insurance companies to provide students, faculty and staff with health care.

Washington University partners with Aetna to provide all full-time undergraduate and degree-seeking graduate students with health insurance. Some provisions included in the student health plan are a $500,000-per-year maximum, a $350 preferred-care deductible, a $10,000 out-of-pocket maximum and 80 percent coinsurance for covered expenses.

Bradley Stoner, associate professor of anthropology and medicine at Washington University, said that the University student health plan offers standard coverage that is comparable to insurance available to the general public.

“For a young, healthy student body, these kinds of limits and coverage should be pretty good,” he said.

According to Alan Glass, assistant vice chancellor and director of the Habif Health and Wellness Center, the University anticipates few significant changes to the student health insurance program for the 2011-2012 academic year.

For the 2010-2011 school year, the student health fee is $575. According to the Student Health Services website, this fee covers the Aetna health insurance policy, care and services rendered at the health center and the equipment used to treat patients. The insurance premium makes up 70 to 75 percent of the student health fee. The premium is guaranteed to remain the same despite projected increases in the student health fee.

“The student health fee for 2011-2012 will be no higher than $632 for the basic student plan,” Glass wrote in an e-mail to Student Life.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposals to slash state spending on higher education has triggered anxiety across California’s already budget-battered public colleges and universities about possible new waves of staff and faculty layoffs, reductions in class offerings and higher tuition bills.

Administrators said it was too soon to say definitively how they would respond if the Legislature approves the $1.4 billion in proposed state funding cuts for the University of California, California State University and the state’s community college system. But they predicted that daily life at the schools would surely suffer in various ways, including more-crowded classes and less pristine campuses.

“It’s not so much the quality of instruction but the quality of the overall educational experience for these students” that may be affected, said Steve Boilard, higher education director at the state Legislative Analyst’s Office,

Among the most concrete predictions came from California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott, who said the cutbacks will mean, in effect, that about 350,000 students will not be able to enroll in any classes at those 112 schools.

UCLA students go through commencement last June. Even before Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal, UC leaders had decided to raise annual undergraduate tuition for the 2011-12 year by 8%. (Luis Sinco, Los Angeles Times / June 10, 2010)

“We just can’t keep doing more with less,” Scott said Tuesday. “This is really sad because we are going to turn away students we would love to educate.”

The governor’s plan also calls for community college fees to rise from $26 per credit unit to $36, which Scott noted would still be among the lowest in the nation.

At Los Angeles City College on Tuesday, psychology student Nela Laveni said higher fees would mean requesting additional hours at her part-time job at an insurance office to continue her schooling.

“That’s the main reason people decide to come here, because it’s so much cheaper,” said Laveni, 18, who is in her first term at the college. “That might be too expensive for me.”

Instructors at the college said they wondered which materials and course offerings would be cut next. Last year, for example, the school’s business department ran out of money for the paper used for teaching and for exams. Now, instructors either buy it with their own money or ask students to bring their own, the teachers said.

Rob Sambrano, who has taught computer and business courses at the college for six years, said the budget cuts and fee increases could keep students from enrolling and improving their job skills during sour economic times.

“A lot of people that are unemployed and looking for work, they’re turning to us to get some skills under their belt and return to the job market,” he said. “And what are we doing? We’re cutting back.”

UC leaders already had decided to raise annual undergraduate tuition for the 2011-12 year by 8%, or $822, to about $11,124, not including campus fees or living costs. That is about triple what it was a decade ago, although financial aid will shield many students from the latest increase.

The university’s regents are not likely to seek an additional tuition increase for the current school year or for the fall unless voters in June reject the governor’s proposal to extend several tax measures, said Patrick J. Lenz, UC’s systemwide vice president for budget. But if the tax plan collapses, he said, “options that may not be very palatable today become more realistic.”

Lenz said it was probably too late in the UC admissions process for enrollment for this fall to be substantially reduced. However, the number of slots for midyear transfer students could be cut, and the freshmen numbers for 2012 might be affected too.

Rather than revive last year’s required furlough days for most faculty and staff, the most likely scenario to cope with the $500-million proposed reduction in state funding for UC’s 10 campuses would be layoffs, he said. And programs deemed not essential to the university’s teaching and research missions “are going to be subject to a great deal of scrutiny and are at jeopardy of being closed.”

At California State University, Chancellor Charles B. Reed said officials would consider reducing enrollment, eliminating classes, laying off staff, furloughing employees and increasing class sizes to address the proposed $500-million loss in state support.

Less likely, Reed said Tuesday, are further tuition increases at the 23-campus university. In November, Cal State trustees approved a 5% increase for winter and spring terms this year and an additional 10% boost for fall 2011. That will bring undergraduate tuition to $4,884, in addition to campus fees that average about $1,000.

Cal State had been ramping up enrollment by 30,000 students for this spring after two years of cuts. The governor’s budget proposal means the system once again is likely to have to restrict enrollment for fall 2011, Reed said.

Overall, the cuts will lead to a lower quality of education for Cal State’s 433,000 students, Reed predicted. “In the end, we won’t be able to provide access to as many students, students will not get the kinds of services and classes and sections they deserve and that they are paying for,” he said.

Via:Los Angeles Times

NASA has announced it’s nailed the first “bone-fide” [sic] rocky exoplanet, which at 1.4 times the diameter of Earth is the smallest such body spotted to date outside our solar system.

As its name suggests, Kepler-10b was identified orbiting star Kepler-10 – at a distance of 560 light years from Earth – by the agency’s habitable planet-seeking Kepler mission.

Between May 2009 and January 2010, the spacecraft identified a list of stars as potential hosts of small planets. Its photometer clocked the miniscule drops in light as a body transited Kepler-10, enabling atronomers to calculate the potential planet’s size, orbital period and distance from the star.

Further work by the WM Keck Observatory 10-meter telescope in Hawaii, specifically measuring “tiny changes in the star’s spectrum, called Doppler shifts, caused by the telltale tug exerted by the orbiting planet on the star”, allowed scientists to announce a confirmed find.

Kepler-10b orbits every 0.84 days, has a mass 4.6 times that of Earth, and a density of 8.8 grams per cubic centimeter, or “similar to that of an iron dumbbell”, as NASA nicely puts it.

grams per cubic centimeter, or “similar to that of an iron dumbbell”, as NASA nicely puts it.

While Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov insisted the exoworld is “unequivocally rocky, with a surface you could stand on”, that would certainly be a bad idea. Kepler-10b is “20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun”, so the surface temperature reaches a balmy 1,300°C.

This puts it outside the exoplanet sweet spot for potential life – the “habitable zone” where liquid water might exist – but NASA nonethless sees Kepler-10b as significant.

Kepler scientist Douglas Hudgins said: “The discovery of Kepler-10b, a bone-fide rocky world, is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own. Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come.”

NASA trumpeted its new-found world at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. Speaking to the BBC at the shindig, veteran exoplanet hunter Geoffrey Marcy, of the University of California, was in no doubt what Kepler-10b represents.

Describing it as “a planetary missing link, a bridge between the gas giant planets we’ve been finding and the Earth itself, a transition… between what we’ve been finding and what we’re hoping to find”, he boldly declared: “This report… will be marked as among the most profound scientific discoveries in human history.”

Bootnote

Here’s more on Kepler 10-b, courtesy of NASA’s Vulcan video department:

Via:TheRegister