NASA: Astronaut bio - Sally K. Ride, Ph.D.

Nanopores and their rolled up version, nanotubes, consist of atoms bonded to each other in a hexagonal pattern to create an array of nanometer-scale openings or channels. This structure creates a filter that can be sized to select which molecules and ions pass into drinking water or into a cell. The same filter technique can limit the release of chemical by-products from industrial processes.

Graduate students are intellectually curious; not omniscient. They are human, and many quite young.

It is a skill we could all spare to learn.

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall." Confucius

IEEE Spectrum: Nanoparticle Completely Eradicates Hepatitis C Virus

The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle whose existence was confirmed by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) on July 4. The discovery of the particle provides the last remaining bit of empirical evidence necessary for the Standard Model of physics, which seeks to explain the existence of all forces in the universe except gravity.

"Living well is the best revenge." George Herbert, English clergyman & metaphysical poet (1593 - 1633).

Steele and his colleagues found that when women were reminded — even subtly — of the stereotype that men were better than women at math, the performance of women in math tests measurably declined. Since the reduction in performance came about because women were threatened by the stereotype, the psychologists called the phenomenon "stereotype threat."

Stereotype threat isn't limited to women or ethnic minorities, Steele wrote elsewhere. "Everyone experiences stereotype threat. We are all members of some group about which negative stereotypes exist, from white males and Methodists to women and the elderly. And in a situation where one of those stereotypes applies — a man talking to women about pay equity, for example, or an aging faculty member trying to remember a number sequence in the middle of a lecture — we know that we may be judged by it."

NPR: How Stereotypes Can Drive Women to Quit Science

The class of particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics, bosons, was named after him by Paul Dirac.

A self-taught scholar and a polyglot (mastery of multiple languages), he had a wide range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature and music. He served on many research and development committees in independent India.

Velocity-distribution data of a gas of rubidium atoms, confirming the discovery of a new phase of matter, the Bose–Einstein condensate... Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. This led to the prediction of the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was demonstrated to exist by experiment in 1995.

Sadly, it was in it the Superconducting Supercollider in Waxahatchie, Texas (there is such a place), where Lederman suggested as "the mother of all colliders" where we were supposed to discover the Higgs...oh, well!

R&D: Media covering the story gave lots of credit to British physicist Peter Higgs for theorizing the elusive subatomic "God particle," but little was said about Satyendranath Bose, the Indian after whom the boson is named.

"He is a forgotten hero," the government lamented in a lengthy statement, noting that Bose was never awarded a Nobel Prize though "at least 10 scientists have been awarded the Nobel" in the same field.

The gentleman you see removing his glasses (expressing a lot of emotion for a theoretical physicist), is none other than Peter Higgs himself (~0:51 into the announcement). A primer on the Higgs Boson (the Boson we have Satyendranath Bose to thank for) will post tomorrow...

Does "teaching to the test" increase student capabilities and knowledge?
This depends on whether the test is good. For multiple-choice tests, "teaching to the test" means focusing on the content that will be on the test, sometimes even drilling on test items, and using the format of the test as a basis for teaching. Since this kind of teaching to the test leads primarily to improved test-taking skills, increases in test scores do not necessarily mean improvement in real academic performance.

Teaching to the test also narrows the curriculum, forcing teachers and students to concentrate on memorization of isolated facts, instead of developing fundamental and higher order abilities. Washington Post

We've had fires and record heat waves; mild winters; hurricanes in New York and freak snowstorms on Halloween in New England (both resulting in power outages). Parts of the Midwest, Maryland and the eastern seaboard has for the most part been without power after freak violent storms. Yet, we question climate change as a result of a warming globe. More than a few Americans don't know what the decision by the Supreme Court on the Affordable Care Act means to them; that the origination of a mandate (for which derisive humor has been spun ad nauseum), came from former Republican Senator Bob Bennett and championed by Former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Teaching to the test also narrows the curriculum, forcing teachers and students to concentrate on memorization of isolated facts, instead of developing fundamental and higher order abilities.

Like the higher order ability of governing a democracy. It's a bit of a stretch, linking climate change to education and governance, but not much.

We need reason and legislation that will create jobs, and an educational system that will prepare kids for future careers requiring skillsets to repair robots, not a high school diploma/GED to drill widgets on a production floor. We're fast becoming a nation predicted by James Boggs: automation and (his word) "cybernation" rules.

We need an educated electorate for this country to be successful, not a bewildered herd.

Oligarchy/Plutocracy are false equivalencies to democracy.

"By their votes, the people exercise their sovereignty." Thomas Jefferson

According to the standard model of cosmology, visible stars and galaxies trace a pattern across the sky known as the cosmic web, which was originally etched out by dark matter — the substance thought to account for almost 80% of the Universe’s matter. Soon after the Big Bang, regions that were slightly denser than others pulled in dark matter, which clumped together and eventually collapsed into flat ‘pancakes’. “Where these pancakes intersect, you get long strands of dark matter, or filaments,” explains Jörg Dietrich, a cosmologist at the University Observatory Munich in Germany. Clusters of galaxies then formed at the nodes of the cosmic web, where these filaments crossed.