Jawaan!

If you’re a college junior who’s making a difference in the world, we want to hear from you. Enter Glamour’s Top 10 College Women Competition by downloading the electronic entry form and two recommendation forms at http://www.glamour.com/about/top-10-college-women. You must have Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader installed to use the forms.

Last Sunday at New Life we had a guest speaker and his sermon was based on Mark 4: 35-41.

Colorado’s CollegeInvest agency, an organization in charge of state loan forgiveness and scholarship programs, is facing criticism and increased scrutiny from the state’s legislature after an audit revealed conflicts of interest and a surprisingly low number of scholarship awards being made by the board.  The state legislature will now require the agency to report to them monthly to ensure proper oversight of the state’s scholarship and student loan funds. The audit found that the CollegeInvest Early Achievers Scholarship , a fund that awards high-achieving high school students with college financial aid , had only given out a tiny fraction of the awards it was expected to since it was established in 2005.  Students opt into the scholarship program as 7th, 8th or 9th graders and pledge to take pre-college coursework in high school and maintain a GPA of 2.5 or better.  The Colorado legislature estimated that the scholarship fund would award about $3.8 million in scholarships per year, but awarded only $91,000 this year.  A volunteerism scholarship program and a student loan forgiveness programs managed by CollegeInvest also fell significantly short of goals and projections.

When talking about optimization here on Inside AdSense , we frequently encourage readers to use the 300×250 medium rectangle.

Financial aid programs that are simple and transparent are most effective for low-income students when it comes to not only getting those students to apply for the aid, but getting them enrolled in college at all, according to a scholarly paper released this week. In a review of more than a dozen studies looking at how to make college more affordable and attainable to the neediest students, the paper “Into College, Out of Poverty? Policies to Increase the Postsecondary Attainment of the Poor” from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the effectiveness of a variety of programs, including popular federal and private scholarships, Pell Grants and subsidized student loans .

“Even if we don’t know what dark matter is, we know how it must act,” said Eduardo Abancens, a physicist at Spain’s University of Zaragoza and designer of a prototype dark matter detector   Dark matter is the modern fairy dust that makes everything (cosmologically) better.  Upon observing that the universe would need to have several hundred times more mass than we can see to be consistent with modern theories, many scientists apparently thought “Fair enough, there must be several universes worth of invisible magic stuff hiding throughout the entirety of existence”.  Rather than the crazy heresy of “Maybe our theories need a little work”. Lots of very smart people have come up with a huge variety of explanations for this absentee material, from ultrarelativistic non-baryonic matter (yes those are real words, even though it sounds like they just smashed together some sciencey sounding stuff), to effects from other universes.  The latter is supported by brane theory, but when you’re combining both dark matter and superstring theory you might as well throw in “A wizard did it” to explain all the flaws. Normally people who constantly look for fictional things are labeled as crazy, and this scientific search may have reached psychosis point with spiral galaxy NGC 4736.  A team from the Polish Academy of Science have observed a spiral galaxy that doesn’t need the dark stuff.  This galaxy can be entirely explained in terms of the matter we see and the theories we have, and in a shocking reversal of the whole “Scientific Method” process other researchers are criticizing the find – because the observations don’t support the invisible thing they believe in

Several thousand years ago the evolution of social organizations in the form of cities brought a new dynamic to the planet that seems to be uniquely human: People actually do walk on average faster in larger cities whereas heart rates decrease as animal size increases. With the city, it seems, mankind has created an “organism” operating beyond the bounds of biology.

The battle against AIDS is one of the holy grails of biomedical research, second only to curing cancer and undoing aging itself.  Now some scientists have reactivated ancient genetic defenses against retroviruses (combining the plots of at least three science fiction movies and two archeological-horror action flicks), rediscovering something even our sickened cells have forgotten. Defensins are immune system proteins which work to defend the body by bonding with invaders to interfere with their functions.  Cyclic theta defensins might sound something a science fiction writer would say after a blow to the head, but they’re a particular form of these useful compounds, called “cyclic” because the peptide chain that forms their backbone is actually circular.  (That’s actually  definition of “theta” defensins, so please excuse our polysyllabic tautology.) These defensins bond to HIV retroviruses to prevent them from entering cells – and a virus which can’t get into cells is just a scrap of amino acids waiting to be destroyed.  This incredibly useful anti-AIDS immune equipment was first found in monkeys, but a joint team of scientists from the Universities of Central Florida, California, and the Center for Disease Control (who are kind of into this sort of thing) found the genetic code for their construction in humans.  So why do thirty-three million people suffer?  Because vulnerability to HIV is a genetic disorder, and one we all have.  Many genetic diseases are the result of “nonsense mutations” where a random piece of code is accidentally transcribed as a stop codon, terminating construction of whatever protein that piece of DNA was responsible for.  Most of such stop mutations are rare because the victims don’t breed but since HIV (or any comparable disease) wasn’t a problem until recently this inability to produce theta-defensins wasn’t naturally selected against.

Deep inside Centaurus A, the closest active galaxy to Earth, about 1,000 light-years across,is the twisted cosmic dust cloud shaped like a parallelogram -likely the result of a smaller spiral galaxy falling into the giant Centaurus A. The Spitzer Space Telescope’s penetrating infrared cameras recorded this startling vista in February 2004. The parallelogram lies along the active galaxy’s central band of dust and stars.

Megafauna Extinctions Not Entirely Humans’ Fault Studies that have mostly blamed the arrival of humans for die-offs among Australia’s large mammals 50,000 years ago missed the role played by a changing climate, new research suggests.