Archive for January, 2011

Education group to push for funding

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Higher-education supporters have formed another new group that aims to pressure the Legislature to be more generous with education funding.

Earlier this year, University of Washington alumni formed a group, UW Impact, to push for more funding for the university. Both Washington State University and Western Washington University are following suit with groups of their own.

The newest group, the College Promise Coalition, was announced Tuesday. It’s an umbrella group that includes public colleges and universities, faculty and student groups, business leaders and education organizations. “This is a broader statewide coalition that will help play a coordinating role” among all the different groups, said spokesman Sandeep Kaushik.

The coalition plans to hold events and rallies in Olympia during the legislative session, Kaushik said, and “make some noise about higher education” and the cutbacks the state’s institutions face.

The coalition is concerned that Gov. Chris Gregoire is downplaying the size of the cuts to higher education proposed in her budget, Kaushik said. Gregoire has said her cuts would trim higher education by 4.2 percent, when tuition increases are taken into consideration.

The coalition says the cutbacks are closer to 8 to 12 percent. The higher number includes a proposed 3 percent salary reduction for state employees, and a proposal that would shift the burden of funding faculty and staff retirement plans to the colleges and universities.

Love your heart this Valentine season

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

February, the month of Valentine’s Day, holds a lot of talk about love and hearts. There is reason beyond romance to think about your heart.

It is National Heart Month, a perfect time to show your own heart some love. It is imperative that you know how to follow a heart-healthy lifestyle and try to avoid heart disease. That is best for you and all those who love you.

Heart disease, including stroke, is the No. 1 killer of both men and women.

The more risk factors you have, the greater the chance you will develop heart disease. The probability goes up with physical inactivity, smoking, obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

The good news is you can reduce risk through lifestyle changes. Try to follow what the American Heart Association calls Life’s Simple 7:

1. Don’t smoke.
2. Do at least 150 minutes of physical activity each week.
3. Meet the healthy diet requirements of the American Heart Association.
4. Have a total cholesterol of less than 200.
5. Have a blood pressure below 120/80.
6. Have a fasting blood glucose level less than 100.
7. Achieve a body mass index of lower than 25.

There are plenty of good things to achieve — besides getting a chance back at life. Lots of delicious foods with plenty of good taste are ready to be eaten: lean meats, low-fat dairy products and whole grains. Seasonings beyond salt, like life-preserving spices, also give flavor. In the cold months when many fresh fruits and vegetables are not in season, canned or frozen ones hold all the nutrition of those recently picked.

If prevention does not go far enough, it is wise to know the signs and symptoms of a cardiovascular event.

The five major symptoms of a heart attack are pain or discomfort in the jaw, neck or back; feeling weak or faint; chest pain; pain in arms or shoulder, and shortness of breath. Someone having a stroke may have numbness or weakness in the face, arm or leg; be confused; have trouble speaking, seeing or walking; dizziness, and loss of balance or coordination.

Any of these signs or symptoms requires emergency care immediately.

It is possible to celebrate Valentine’s Day while being good to your heart. Heart-Healthy No-Bake Cookies provide a treat both heart-healthy and delicious, with smart-to-eat fats, antioxidants and fiber that emphasize eating for and with a healthy heart. The recipe, adapted from www.food.com, needs no baking as well. (more…)

NASA’s Week of Surprises for Shuttle Crew

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

First the Wife of Endeavour Commander Mark Kelly Is Shot, Then a Crew Member Has Bike Accident

The events of the last two Saturdays have stunned NASA in a way the space agency could never anticipated.

Mark Kelly, Endeavour’s commander for the space shuttle mission in April, found himself on the way to Arizona where his wife, Rep, Gabrielle Giffords, was critically injured in a shooting. Kelly, at his wife’s bedside while she fights for recovery, asked NASA to name a backup commander, Rick Sturckow, for Kelly’s mission.

This past weekend, astronaut Tim Kopra was injured during a bicycle ride. The extent of his injuries has not been released, but they are serious enough to have mission managers scrambling to consider who could take his place on the STS 133 mission, Discovery’s oft-delayed final flight, which is tentatively scheduled to launch next month.

NASA’s choices: Wait for Kopra to heal from his injuries, or replace him on the mission. Kopra has been training for his two spacewalks for well over a year — his mission was originally scheduled to fly in September 2010 and it was once the last space shuttle flight before the fleet was retired.

Astronauts give up anything risky when they start training for a flight — no car racing, no sky diving, no scuba diving, no mountain climbing. Drew Feustel, who flew on the last mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, had to indulge his love for fast cars on the sidelines, watching his sons’ race. Scott Parazynksi climbed Mount Everest only after he retired from the astronaut corps. (more…)

Scientist Plans to Clone Woolly Mammoth

Sunday, January 16th, 2011

Scientist Plans to Clone Woolly Mammoth (Just Not For Theme Park)

Get your Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King jokes ready. A professor at Japan’s Kyoto University is claiming that he’ll be able to resurrect a woolly mammoth within roughly four years’ time, bringing new life to a species that died out more than 5,000 years prior.

Even though Dr. Akira Iritani isn’t going to attempt to duplicate DNA strains from animals trapped in amber, the technique he’s propositioning—which was already used by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology to clone a mouse previously frozen for sixteen years—does sound fairly close to that on paper.

Iritani intends to travel up to a Russian mammoth research laboratory this summer in order to acquire the correct tissue from a frozen mammoth. If he can uncover a working sample of at least three square centimeters, he’ll claims that he’ll be able to insert the nuclei of the frozen mammoth cells into the egg cells of an African elephant. Following a 600-day gestation period, out pops a new woolly mammoth—in theory.

“Now that the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” said Iritani in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. (more…)

Down’s syndrome DNA blood test ‘better screening offer’

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

A DNA blood test for Down’s syndrome could save nearly all pregnant women from invasive tests like amniocentesis, say experts.

Invasive testing takes place in 3% to 5% of pregnant women in the UK – some 30,000 women – and increases the risk of miscarriage.

The new DNA blood test could bring this down to 0.1%, according to a study in the British Medical Journal.

Around one woman in every 100 who has an invasive test will miscarry.

Some faced with the dilemma choose not to go for a diagnostic test – which involves having a needle inserted into their bump to draw off a sample of placenta cells or some of the fluid that bathes the baby – particularly if their estimated risk of having a child with Down’s syndrome is smaller than the chance of miscarriage.

The non-invasive DNA blood test could offer another option. (more…)

Top 5 Laptops and Notebooks

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
Netbooks could be seen all over, into schools offices as well as people’s properties. Their smaller, energy weight and also may achieve only as much a warm or hot environment a average machine. The shapely small size as well as neat little form factor make them okay as carrying them in the bus, cabs and bikes, build them get it over for individuals who likes how to get alternate routes. here should be five top sellers who go about making noticeable distinction and wow it big by netbook fans.

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the first one in The great five is The Toshiba NB 205-310. it without doubt has excellent worth for its monetary value tag; this has a huge grope pad and an extra long power duration, ideal for people making use of their netbooks at The go. Toshiba is brand new To the netbook department but has rapidly made it how to The great seller list. (more…)

Higher education leaders anxious about cuts in proposed California budget

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

They worry that Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed California budget will mean fewer classes, fewer services and fewer students getting the higher education they need to succeed.

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. (more…)

NASA trumpets rocky exoplanet find

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Kepler-10b is ‘planetary missing link’

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. (more…)

Google Launches Worldwide Science Fair

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Google has launched an online science fair, allowing any student with an Internet connection and a Google account to take part in the competitive event.

“You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world,” Google wrote in a blog post.

The Google Global Science Fair 2011 is open to students aged 13-18 years old, working solo or in groups of up to three. Applicants should come up with their own hypothesis, create an experiment to test it, and present the results and conclusion in either a two-minute video or a 20-slide presentation. Current entries from offline local science fairs will also be accepted when embedded into Google’s application. Registration is open through April 4, 2011.

In partnership with the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google is awarding 12 prizes, including the grand prize of a 10-day trip to the Galapagos with National Geographic Explorer and a Google scholarship worth $50,000. Select winners will also receive internship opportunities with the sponsors. (more…)

Verizon website downtime reminiscent of AT&T iPhone preorder troubles

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Strong interest in the newly announced Verizon iPhone appears to have caused intermittent outages on the Verizon website Tuesday, resembling AT&T’s iPhone 4 preorder woes from last year.

Scattered reports of downtime on the Verizon Wireless website seem to indicate that pent up demand for the Verizon iPhone has overwhelmed the carrier’s servers at times throughout the day.

According to one AppleInsider reader, attempts to access the upgrade section of Verizon’s website timed out or received the message: “Safari can’t open the page because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is busy. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again.”

Several other readers have also reported being unable to access the Verizon website on Tuesday.

Verizon announced the much-rumored and long-awaited CDMA iPhone earlier Tuesday at a press event in New York City. (more…)