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Submission + - New 'academic redshirt' for engineering undergrads (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Redshirting isn’t just for athletes anymore. The University of Washington and Washington State University are collaborating on an “academic redshirt” program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor’s program. The first year will help those incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline.

Submission + - ATLAS Results: One Or Two Higgs ? (mozilla.org)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: An LHC physicist writes:

ATLAS has a very nice signal of H-> in a total of 17.8/fb of collision data. You can make no mistake here: that is a new resonance for sure.Now let us instead turn to the H->ZZ->four lepton decay mode.Here the signal strength is more in agreement with the standard model prediction, but the best-fit mass (123.5 GeV) is significantly lower than the fit 126.5 GeV of the gamma-gamma mode!

What is going on ?
Education

Submission + - American Kids & Science Education: The Exaggerated 'Dismal' Claims (usatoday.com) 2

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: We've all seen the stories about how 'dismal' science education in America is. It turns out that it's kind of a straw man. America has long led the world in science but the 'average' score for Americans on standardized tests has never been good. Instead, every 2 years American kids get better but we keep being told things are terrible. Here is why.
Power

Submission + - Solar Power Is Booming - Why Do We Want To Kill It? (forbes.com)

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: Solar power is booming. Imports from China were a tepid $21 million in 2005 but in 2011 installations totaled nearly $2.7 billion. That’s a huge win. And just as advocates for solar power had hoped, a larger market drove down prices. Solar energy cost has declined by two-thirds in the last four years, meaning it will soon start to close in on fossil fuels.

There's just one problem. Now the government wants to kill it.

Submission + - NYC bans mention of dinosaurs, dancing, birthdays on student tests. (nypost.com)

Submitted by SchroedingersCat
SchroedingersCat writes: New York educators banned references to "dinosaurs," "birthdays," "Halloween" and dozens of other topics on city-issued tests. That is because they fear such topics "could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students." Dinosaurs, for example, call to mind evolution, which might upset fundamentalists; birthdays are not celebrated by Jehovah's Witnesses; and Halloween suggests paganism. Homes with swimming pools and home computers are also unmentionables — because of economic sensitivities. The city asks test companies to exclude “creatures from outer space" as well — for unspecified reasons.
Space

Submission + - Starships in a Century? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the New York Times, Kenneth Chang writes about the 100-year starship conference, where "an eclectic mix of engineers, scientists, science fiction fans, students and dreamers" discussed ideas for how to travel across interstellar space, including "how to organize and finance a century-long project; whether civilization would survive, because an engine to propel a starship could also be used for a weapon to obliterate the planet; and whether people need to go along for the trip."
Some of the proposals were pretty far out, such as Joseph Breeden's concept for an engine-less starship (propelled using a gravity slingshot on a near-sun trajectory). Others were a little less forward thinking, although still futuristic by current standards of space exploration: nuclear rockets, fusion, lightsails, and so forth.
So, can we go to the stars? Wait a hundred years, and we'll see!
Moon

Submission + - New Moon Mission Launched (nasa.gov) 1

Submitted by
sighted
sighted writes: "The twin lunar Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral this morning. GRAIL-A is scheduled to reach the moon on New Year's Eve 2011, while GRAIL-B will arrive New Year's Day 2012. The two solar-powered spacecraft will fly in tandem orbits around the moon to measure its gravity field. Lunar explorers hope the mission will answer longstanding questions about the moon 'from crust to core.'"

Submission + - Boost Your WiFi Signal Using Only a Beer Can (discovery.com) 2

Submitted by AmyVernon
AmyVernon writes: This hack is supposed to boost signal strength by at least 2 to 4 bars.
What you need: scissors, a utility knife, some adhesive putty and an empty beer can. The brand doesn't matter for the router, but I suppose it would be cooler looking if it were Asahi or Stella Artois than if it were Budweiser.
Moon

Submission + - Moon younger than previously thought (news.ku.dk) 2

Submitted by TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: Analysis of a piece of lunar rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972 has shown that the Moon may be much younger than previously believed.
Idle

Submission + - Finally, Sadomasochism Gets Its Own Science Study (scientificblogging.com)

Submitted by
TaeKwonDood
TaeKwonDood writes: "You might think throwing out the occasional titillating article title is part of some grand media strategy. Discover is famous for whoring themselves out for page views with articles like Bizarre Aquatic Creatures Are Secretly Lesbian Necrophiliacs and Scientific American gets into the act with Rough Sex at 40,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which got them additionally ridiculed because that is about 30X greater than the radius of the Earth, but there are occasionally real articles that aren't all tramped up and just happen to deal with sex; some of it even kinky. All of it involving cortisol. The difficulty? Kinky people are okay with being monitored and they don't always realize what 'control' means in a scientific context, but they sure don't like to stick within the study parameters."

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