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  Adaptation of chemical ionization mass spectrometers for the detection of amino acids and development of other experimental methods for planetary life detection;
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  Classified research involved with missile reeentry and missile defense;
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  Design and building of space instrumentation, atmospheric contaminant sensors, magnetic mass spectrometers, mass analyzers;
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  Development of new concepts of magnet design and the invention of a new type of x-ray spectrometer.

And yet, the United States has created the right environment for nanomanufacturing to succeed here with its strong foundation in basic research and development, a skilled workforce and private and public investment support.

One nanotechnology--graphene--is relatively new to the nanomanufacturing sector, and NSF Small Business Innovation Research grantee Vorbeck Materials of Jessup, Md., is at the forefront of efforts to bring graphene technology to the marketplace.

According to researchers at Vorbeck, the company's Vor-ink™ graphene-based conductive ink for electronics was first introduced at the Printed Electronics Europe 2009 tradeshow and was directly marketed and sold to customers there--making it one of the first (if not the first) graphene products to go to market.

The design forms a living laboratory for the STEM curriculum and provides spaces throughout the school for hands-on learning experiences focusing on problem-solving and learner-centered education. Academic communities, a STEM lab and collaboration areas encourage students to ask questions and engage in activities with their teachers and peers. This creates a STEM-centric learning environment where students gain skills and abilities to think critically, solve complex problems, and understand advancements in science and technology.

Where do I begin? I spent the last thirty minutes listening to a group of arrogant and condescending noneducators disrespect my colleagues and profession. I listened to a group of disingenuous people whose own self-interests guide their policies rather than the interests of children. I listened to a cabal of people who sit on national education committees that will have a profound impact on classroom teaching practices. And I heard nothing of value. “I’m thinking about the current health-care debate,” I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”

The strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has everyone’s attention.

“I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”

Twelfth graders that want to graduate with a diploma have to continue this schedule as well as ordering cap and gowns, sending out invitations that may or may not be to their graduations.

• Homework
• Quizzes, tests
• Leading up to midterms and finals each semester
• Sports, dating, dances...a life

The TIC is sucking the life's blood out of education; burning out teachers; not preparing our youth for critical thinking skills, or higher advancement and well-paying jobs, with NO evidence that this draconian, market-as-deity-driven approach has worked anywhere else on the planet! We are preparing them for nothing but a future of dependency and hopelessness. It is pursuing Chimera; dueling quixotic windmills, whistling nervously as the reason for education other than an informed citizenry - jobs - is outsourced to other academically prepared shores.

Without such knowledge, we cannot have scientific advancement, or a functional democracy.

Newsone: Britney Exline, Nation's Youngest African American Engineer

That's how the Tunguska event felt 40 miles from ground zero.

Today, June 30, 2008, is the 100th anniversary of that ferocious impact near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote Siberia--and after 100 years, scientists are still talking about it.¹

*****

Earlier today I was wondering why Russia gets all the good meteor strikes–like this one, which looks like a viral promo for a sci-fi movie, captured from a dashboard-mounted video camera. What I should have been asking – and Wired did – was “why do Russian motorists have video cameras on their dashboards in the first place?”

Apparently, Russia’s combination of geographic immensity and lax law enforcement incentivizes everyone to install these “dash-cams” in their cars. If you get into a he-said/she-said traffic accident in the middle of nowhere, you can use the video footage as proof of what actually happened.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic. But more importantly, it folds into local culture – and back again – in totally unpredictable ways. As Frederik Pohl (another sci fi author) remarked, good science fiction predicts the traffic jam, not the automobile. Who would have thought that the perfect system for visually documenting a historic meteor strike would be a nation full of drivers strapping cheap, flash-based webcams to their dashboards as a backstop against rampant legal corruption?²

“We felt here some kind of similarity with quantum chaotic systems,” explained Šeba’s co-author, Milan Krbálek, in an email.

After several failed attempts to talk to the spies himself, Šeba asked his student to explain to them that he wasn’t a tax collector, or a criminal — he was simply a “crazy” scientist willing to trade tequila for their data. The men handed over their used papers. When the researchers plotted thousands of bus departure times on a computer, their suspicions were confirmed: The interaction between drivers caused the spacing between departures to exhibit a distinctive pattern previously observed in quantum physics experiments.

“I was thinking that something like this could come out, but I was really surprised that it comes exactly,” Šeba said.

Subatomic particles have little to do with decentralized bus systems. But in the years since the odd coupling was discovered, the same pattern has turned up in other unrelated settings. Scientists now believe the widespread phenomenon, known as “universality,” stems from an underlying connection to mathematics, and it is helping them to model complex systems from the Internet to Earth’s climate.

College of Arts and Sciences

North Carolina A&T State University has been ranked in the top tier of national universities in several categories in the 2013 U.S. News & World Report college rankings.

The national news magazine released its annual list of rankings in early September. N.C. A&T earned top 25 honors amongst the nation’s top online programs in the area of information technology. Online IT faculty ranked No. 7 in faculty credentials and training while the program ranked Nos. 15 and 19 in student services and technology and student engagements and accreditation, respectively.²

And while love is in the air, both love and the nano-cupid are fragile.

"It's a really fragile structure at this point – blowing on it or touching it would destroy it," said BYU physics professor Robert Davis.

To strengthen both the cupid and other micro-machines, Davis and his colleague Richard Vanfleet coat the nanostructures with metals and other materials. That opens the door to all kinds of uses.

Astronomers have found several rocky worlds in the habitable zone, the region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface, and many more are thought to exist. As telescopes get more sensitive, we should be able to collect light reflected off such planets and look for clues to their surface conditions.

Seen from space, Earth gives off a large amount of near-infrared light, which is reflecting off the chlorophyll in plants. We might see a similar "red edge" on distant exoplanets if they also host green vegetation.

United Way of the Bluegrass partnered with First Bracktown Inc., University of Kentucky, Fayette County Public Schools and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation to create the STEM Academy. Adante and 39 other middle school males attend weekly out-of-school programming with STEM focused activities.

And, it’s working. Seventy percent of STEM Academy students have improved their overall grades. These amazing results prove all children can succeed in school.

“Any program that supports the future of our children is important,” says Brian. “Having a program like this is beneficial to both the kids and society as a whole.”

The robot goes by Rex (short for robotic exoskeleton) or Million-Dollar Man (because that’s how much it cost to build him). Rex looks somewhat lifelike in that he has prosthetic hands, feet and a face modeled after a real man. That man is Swiss social psychologist Bertolt Meyer, who himself has a prosthetic hand. Such technology is now becoming more widely available to the general public.

But where Rex really breaks new ground is his suite of working organs. The team of roboticists, called Shadow, that created Rex incorporated various individual body parts built in labs all over the globe. He acts as a sort of showcase to demonstrate the human organs that are currently being built in the lab and what they can do.

Rex has a heart that beats with the help of a battery, and eyes that actually kind of see: Rex’s glasses send images to a microchip is his retina, which in turn sends electrical pulses to the brain, forming shapes and patterns. But the roboticists didn’t even try to tackle the complexity of the human brain this time.

Rex’s fist-sized dialysis unit works like a real kidney, and his mock spleen can filter infections from his “blood.” This filtering function could eventually be extremely helpful in a human, but Rex’s mock-circulatory system pumps a synthetic blood that is immune to infection.

Rex’s creators say he is the most complete bionic man to date.

In principle, they are simple devices. They consist of a couple of mirrors, a source of energy, usually light, and a lasing cavity in which the light can bounce back and forth.

The trick is to fill the lasing cavity with a material known as a gain medium which amplifies at a specific frequency when stimulated by light of another frequency. When this amplified light is directed out of the cavity, using a half-mirror, it forms a narrow beam of coherent light of a single specific frequency–a laser beam.

For many applications, the shape of this beam– the way the light intensity varies across the beam–is important.

But because these devices are essentially bolted on to the front of a laser, they all require expensive custom optics that have to be calibrated each time they are changed.

Today, however, Sandile Ngcobo at the University of KwaZulu–Natal in South Africa and few buddies, say they’ve worked out a way round this. And they've designed and built a device to test their idea.

The solution is simple. Instead of putting a spatial light modulator in front of the laser, they’ve built one in to the device, where it acts as the mirror at one end of the cavity. In this way, the spatial light modulator shapes the beam as it is being amplified.