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Accounts, which are a good option for families who don’t want to invest more than $2,000 a year for their college-bound children, every parent should be able to find a college saving account to meet their budgets and their needs. A good start for families unsure of where to begin or how much they should strive to save ... |
cost by using a college financial aid calculator. It’s fine to start with a conservative number, as some of the college saving accounts come with stipulations that the funds must be used for college expenses, which could hurt parents whose children don’t end up going to college or go for a low-cost option like communit... |
funding levels made by the government, comes in the form of federal grant programs, federal student loans and federal work-study programs. The best indicator of your eligibility for all federal aid is the FAFSA, which is also available online to speed up processing and is ready for you to fill out starting Jan. 1 of ea... |
any private loan you’d qualify for. A little bit of research will not only help you to understand financial aid information better, but help dispel popular misconceptions about the process. Many students think they’re not eligible for many forms of aid, or that applying will not only be tedious but futile. The truth is... |
if not the most important step you’ll take toward getting yourself into college. More than $130 billion is awarded to college-bound students annually, and while it certainly helps to supplement your application with an impressive academic record, much of the funding is also needs-based or based on criteria that have no... |
out your FAFSA, conduct a free scholarship search to find awards you may have never known you were eligible for otherwise, and pad your financial aid package with as much free money from scholarships and grants as you can. The best way to know what to expect of your financial aid process is to do your research. Lucky f... |
you, and will continue to update our site with the latest news on financial aid happenings that could affect how much you get from the government. Check out our links for financial aid news to determine not only what higher education institutions are doing to affect students’ financial aid packages, but moves the gover... |
– for you to take out loans, get awarded grants, and pay for college. While college is supposed to be one of the most rewarding times in your life, you don’t want to be faced with a monthly payment post-graduation that takes over a high percentage of your salary, or worse yet, one you’d be forced to default on, hurting... |
money for college by educating yourself on the options available and taking advantage of the millions of dollars being awarded to college-bound high school students each year. And if you’re faced with a bigger tuition bill than you thought, consider your options to keep your college costs low. |
5 October 2011 | EN | FR The East Africa famine calls into question the wisdom of investing in early warning systems without improving take-up, writes Linda Nordling. When the UN declared a state of famine in the Horn of Africa in July, one group of scientists was not surprised. In August 2010, the USAID-funded Famine ... |
(FEWS NET) had issued a prediction of poor March–May rains this year. The tens of thousands of people that have died since then in East Africa, and the millions that remain hungry, are a harsh indictment of the ability of science-based early warnings of disaster to make a difference to the continent's most vulnerable p... |
science data make predictions easier, more effort will be needed to understand and improve the uptake of early warnings at local, national and international levels. Why warnings fail So why did the rainfall warning fail to avert the disaster in the Horn of Africa? The problem is multifaceted, and not easy to address. W... |
Funk lists a number of reasons, from conflicting climate research predicting wetter conditions in East Africa, to political obstacles (especially conflict in Somalia) and the region's rapid population growth outpacing agricultural yields. Funk believes the answer is more science and better agricultural practices to imp... |
long-term strategy for feeding the region's population will limit the need for emergency response, he says. While most media reports have focused on the international community's failure to respond, Funk focuses on what must be done in Africa to improve uptake. He is right to do so. The failure of warnings to filter do... |
is a graver problem than that of mobilising emergency aid, criticised by many observers for creating a dependency culture in formerly self-sufficient regions. Data poor no more The past decade's strong science push in Africa has boosted the understanding of its climate, diseases, and political and economic systems. Thi... |
are now in place — or being set up — for predicting food price variability, malaria outbreaks, floods and even armed conflicts. They are all being billed as tools that can revolutionise the continent's response to emergencies. But it is not just FEWS NET that is struggling to live up to expectations. Last month, Nigeri... |
governments of ignoring early warnings of floods that killed more than an estimated 140 people and left tens of thousands homeless. In Nigeria, the problem was a failure of state governments to act upon warnings by clearing drains and evacuating people living in flood plains. The weakest link Similar barriers held back... |
"There is a weak link between early warning and response," says Gideon Galu, a scientist with FEWS NET based in Nairobi, Kenya. Although FEWS NET works with decision-makers in the national government to highlight its findings, the link-up to local authorities and rural communities relies on national government structur... |
that passes scientific information on to decision-makers. Nongovernmental organisations and other partners can attend meetings and get a consensus on the scale and magnitude of a problem. But the final link in the flow of information is problematic in Kenya, and in Ethiopia; and it's particularly weak in countries like... |
information dissemination networks to make sure that messages reach the local level. These failures illustrate a key obstacle that many African countries must overcome. The impact of science-based early warning systems hinges on governments' capability (and perhaps willingness) to turn warnings into readiness on the gr... |
as it establishes strong networks that reach down to the community level — an activity that FEWS NET is working on. The organisation is also working to address the underlying vulnerability to food crises via the US Feed the Future programme, a US$3.5 billion investment in strengthening agriculture in Ethiopia, Kenya an... |
rural communities will also improve FEWS NET's capability to collect data on variables such as rainfall and temperature, making prediction more of a two-way street, adds Gulu. "They are now able to provide us with additional data about what is happening in the field," he says. But there is a downside: the explosion in ... |
warnings could grow into a cacophony of calls to emergency action that compete for policymakers' attention and scarce resources. Such 'warning fatigue' would make it harder to discern credible alerts and act on them. In that future, a warning system well-connected to decision-makers with functioning lines of communicat... |
all the money has gone to improving the science while neglecting the capacity to put the evidence to good use. Journalist Linda Nordling, based in Cape Town, South Africa, specialises in African science policy, education and development. She was the founding editor of Research Africa and writes for SciDev.Net, Nature a... |
476, 7 (2011) Susan fm LWEC ( Living With Environmental Change | United Kingdom ) 5 October 2011 This in some ways is a chilling article. However, I had a good insight into early warning fatigue at a Humanitarian Vision/NERC workshop to bring climate scientists into better dialogue with NGOs. We role played how we'd ma... |
and it gave fascinating first hand insights into risk perception and how it varied in the room. Strikes me that this is very relevant in this context All SciDev.Net material is free to reproduce providing that the source and author are appropriately credited. For further details see Creative Commons. |
LA JOLLA, Calif., July 18, 2012 – In their quest to treat cardiovascular disease, researchers and pharmaceutical companies have long been interested in developing new medicines that activate a heart |
protein called APJ. But researchers at Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (Sanford-Burnham) and the Stanford University School of Medicine have now uncovered a second, previously unknown, function for APJ—it senses mechanical |
changes when the heart is in danger and sets the body on a course toward heart failure. This means that activating APJ could actually be harmful in some cases—potentially eye-opening |
information for some heart drug makers. The study appears July 18 in Nature. "Just finding a molecule that activates APJ is not enough. What's important to heart failure is not |
if this receptor is 'on' or 'off,' but the way it's activated," said Pilar Ruiz-Lozano, Ph.D., who led the study. Ruiz-Lozano, formerly assistant professor at Sanford-Burnham, is now associate professor |
of pediatrics in the Stanford University School of Medicine and adjunct faculty member at Sanford-Burnham. Stretching the heart APJ is a receptor that sits on the cell surface in many |
organs, where it senses the external environment. When a hormone called apelin comes along and binds APJ, it sets off a molecular chain reaction that influences a number of cellular |
functions. Many previous studies have shown that apelin-APJ activity directs beneficial processes such as embryonic heart development, maintenance of normal blood pressure, and new blood vessel formation. According to Ruiz-Lozano's |
latest study, however, APJ can also be activated a second, more harmful, way that doesn't involve apelin. In this pathway, APJ senses and responds to mechanical changes in the heart. |
To better understand these mechanical changes, let's look at a person with high blood pressure. In this case, the person's heart has to work harder to pump the same amount |
of blood at the same rate as a healthy person. To meet the increased demand, individual heart muscle cells start making more proteins, making the cells bigger. Eventually, cell membranes |
stretch and each cell begins to pull away from its neighbor. This leads to an enlarged heart—a condition known as hypertrophy. In pathological (disease) conditions, hypertrophy can lead to heart |
failure. APJ and heart failure The best way to determine the role a protein plays in a particular cellular process is to see what happens when it's missing. To do |
this, Ruiz-Lozano's team, including co-first authors Maria Cecilia Scimia, Ph.D. and Cecilia Hurtado, Ph.D., used mice that lack APJ. Under everyday conditions, the APJ-deficient mice appeared perfectly normal. However, unlike |
their normal counterparts, the mice lacking APJ couldn't sense danger when their hearts enlarged. As a result, mice were actually healthier without APJ—none succumbed to heart failure. "In other words, |
without APJ, ignorance is bliss—the heart doesn't sense the danger and so it doesn't activate the hypertrophic pathways that lead to heart failure," Ruiz-Lozano said. "This tells us that, depending |
Mar. 20, 2007 An overexpressed protein protects human pancreatic cancer cells from being forced to devour themselves, removing one of the body's natural defenses against out-of-control cell growth, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report in the March issue of Molecular Cancer Research... |
M. D. Anderson and elsewhere to be overexpressed in a variety of drug-resistant cancer cells and in cancer that has spread from its original organ (metastasized). "In general, you rarely see overexpression of TG2 in a normal cell," says Kapil Mehta, Ph.D., professor in the M. D. Anderson Department of Experimental Ther... |
and colleagues in the past year have connected TG2 overexpression to drug-resistant and metastatic breast cancer, pancreatic cancer and melanoma. Expression of TG2 is tightly regulated in a healthy cell, Mehta says, and is temporarily increased in response to certain hormones or stress factors. "However, constitutive e... |
are developing TG2 as a pharmaceutical target and are now working with a mouse model to that end." The mechanisms by which TG2 might promote drug-resistance and metastasis have remained elusive, the researchers note. In this paper, the M. D. Anderson team shows in lab experiments that inhibiting the protein in pancreat... |
or self-digestion. TG2 was inhibited in two separate ways. First, the researchers blocked another protein known to activate TG2. Secondly, they also directly targeted TG2 with a tiny molecule known as small interfering RNA tailored to shut down expression of the protein. In both cases, the result was a drastic reductio... |
the cancer cells, which became riddled with cavities called vacuoles. When autophagy occurs, a double membrane forms around a cell organ, or organelle. This autophagosome then merges with a digestive organelle called a lysosome and everything inside is consumed, leaving the vacuole and a residue of digested material. I... |
study co-author, notes that the research also shows that the self-consuming cell death prevented by TG2 is independent of a prominent molecular pathway also known to regulate autophagy called the mammalian target of rapamycin. "Targeting TG2, or its activating protein PKC, or both, presents a novel and potentially effe... |
in the early stages, the researchers caution. The researchers also show that the TG2 pathway also is separate from another, better known, form of programmed cell death called apoptosis. Apoptosis, like autophagy, is a normal biological defense mechanism that systematically destroys defective cells by forcing them to ki... |
organelles preserved. Autophagy kills by degrading those other organelles while sparing the nucleus. Mehta's lab reported in a Cancer Research paper last September that TG2 overexpression also activates a protein called nuclear factor-kB known to play a role in regulating cell growth, metastasis and apoptosis. This pat... |
Mehta and Lopez-Berestein are: co-first authors Ugur Akar, Ph.D., and Bulent Ozpolat, M.D., Ph.D., and Jansina Fok, all of the Department of Experimental Therapeutics, and Yasuko Kondo, M.D., Ph.D, of the M. D. Anderson Department of Neurosurgery. Funding for this research was provided by the National Cancer Institute ... |
Mar. 4, 2013 Behind locked doors, in a lab built like a bomb shelter, Perry Gerakines makes something ordinary yet truly alien: ice. This isn't the ice of snowflakes or |
ice cubes. No, this ice needs such intense cold and low pressure to form that the right conditions rarely, if ever, occur naturally on Earth. And when Gerakines makes the |
ice, he must keep the layer so microscopically thin it is dwarfed by a grain of pollen. These ultrathin layers turn out to be perfect for recreating some of the |
key chemistry that takes place in space. In these tiny test tubes, Gerakines and his colleagues in the Cosmic Ice Lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., |
can reproduce reactions in ice from almost any time and place in the history of the solar system, including some that might help explain the origin of life. "This is |
not the chemistry people remember from high school," says Reggie Hudson, who heads the Cosmic Ice Lab. "This is chemistry in the extreme: bitter cold, harsh radiation and nearly non-existent |
pressure. And it's usually taking place in gases or solids, because generally speaking, there aren't liquids in interstellar space." The Cosmic Ice Lab is one of a few laboratories worldwide |
where researchers have been studying the ultracool chemistry of cosmic ice. With its powerful particle accelerator, the Goddard lab has the special ability to mimic almost any kind of solar |
or cosmic radiation to drive these reactions. And that lets them dig deep to study the chemistry of ice below the surface of planets and moons as well as ice |
in space. Recipe for disorder In a vacuum chamber about the size of a lunchbox, Gerakines recreates a little patch of deep space, in all its extremes. He pumps out |
air until the pressure inside drops to a level a billion times lower than normal for Earth, then chills the chamber to minus 433 degrees Fahrenheit (15 kelvins). To get |
ice, all that remains is to open a valve and let in water vapor. The instant the sprightly vapor molecules enter the chamber they are literally frozen in their tracks. |
Still pointing every which way, the molecules are transformed immediately from their gaseous state into the disorderly solid called amorphous ice. Amorphous ice is exactly the opposite of the typical |
ice on Earth, which forms perfect crystals like those that make up snowflakes or frost needles. These crystals are so orderly and predictable that this ice is considered a mineral, |
complete with a rating of 2.5 on the Mohs scale of hardness -- the same rating as a fingernail. Though almost unheard of on Earth, amorphous ice is so widespread |
in interstellar space that it could be the most common form of water in the universe. Left over from the age when the solar system was born, it is scattered |
across vast distances, often as particles no bigger than grains of dust. It's also been spotted in comets and icy moons. The secret to making amorphous ice in the lab, |
Gerakines finds, is to limit the layer to a depth of about half a micrometer -- thinner than a strand of spider's silk. "Water is such a good insulator that |
if the ice gets too thick, only the bottom of the sample, closer to the cooling source, will stay sufficiently cold," says Gerakines. "The ice on top will get warm |
enough to crystallize." The superthin ice can be spiked with all kinds of interesting chemicals found in space. One set of chemicals that Gerakines works with is amino acids, which |
are key players in the chemistry of life on Earth. Researchers have spent decades identifying a whole smorgasbord of amino acids in meteorites (including some involved in life), as well |
as one found in a sample taken from a comet. "And because water is the dominant form of frozen material in the interstellar medium and outer solar system," says Gerakines, |
"any amino acids out there are probably in contact with water at some point." For his current set of experiments, Gerakines makes three kinds of ice, each spiked with an |
amorphous form of an amino acid (either glycine, alanine or phenylalanine) that is found in proteins. The real action begins when Gerakines hits the ice with radiation. Earlier studies by |
other researchers have looked at ice chemistry using ultraviolet light. Gerakines opts instead to look at cosmic radiation, which can reach ice hidden below the surface of a planet or |
moon. To mimic this radiation, he uses a proton beam from the high-voltage particle accelerator, which resides in an underground room lined with immense concrete walls for safety. With the |
proton beam, a million years' worth of damage can be reproduced in just half an hour. And by adjusting the radiation dose, Gerakines can treat the ice as if it |
were lying exposed or buried at different depths of soil in comets or icy moons and planets. He tests the three kinds of water-plus-amino-acid ice and compares them to ice |
made from amino acids only. Between blasts, he checks the samples using a "molecular fingerprinting" technique called spectroscopy to see if the amino acids are breaking down and chemical by-products |
are forming. As expected, more and more of the amino acids break down as the radiation dose adds up. But Gerakines notices that the amino acids last longer if the |
ice includes water than if they are left on their own. This is odd, because when water breaks down, one of the fragments it leaves behind is hydroxyl (OH), a |
chemical well-known for attacking other compounds. The spectroscopy confirms that some OH is being produced. But overall, says Gerakines, "the water is essentially acting like a radiation shield, probably absorbing |
a lot of the energy, the same way a layer of rock or soil would." When he repeats the experiments at two higher temperatures, he is surprised to find the |
acids fare even better. From these preliminary measurements, he and Hudson calculate how long amino acids could remain intact in icy environments over a range of temperatures. "We find that |
some amino acids could survive tens to hundreds of millions of years in ice near the surface of Pluto or Mars and buried at least a centimeter [less than half |
an inch] deep in places like the comets of the outer solar system," says Gerakines. "For a place that gets heavy radiation, like Europa, they would need to be buried |
a few feet." (These findings were reported in the journal Icarus in August 2012.) "The good news for exploration missions," says Hudson, "is it looks as if these amino acids |
are actually more stable than anybody realized at temperatures typical of places like Pluto, Europa and even Mars." The Cosmic Ice Lab is part of the Astrochemistry Laboratory in Goddard's |
Solar System Exploration Division and is funded in part by the Goddard Center for Astrobiology and the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Other social bookmarking and sharing tools: Note: If no author |
View The Sky And Celestial Bodies Just As Galilieo Did 400 Years Ago The Galileoscope is 400 years of product development in the making - this high-quality telescope kit was developed by leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators to showcase how early astronomers made their discoveries. Once assemble... |
moons circling Jupiter, the phases of Venus, Saturn's rings, and countless stars invisible to the unaided eye. The 50mm diameter telescope offers 25X to 50X magnification. The kit is easy-to-assemble and includes standard components such as a base that fits most tripods and a 1.25 focuser. Educational activities and ob... |
As the use of technologies becomes less of an issue and approaches such as the use of SMS for mobile learning become ubiquitous – our attention must now move to an increased focus on pedagogy. How will the use of these technologies affect learners’ abilities to learn? How will teachers and facilitators need to change t... |
access and control of content explodes, the higher education institutions that move toward the integration of services such assessing learning, helping students organize what they know into meaningful packages and then credential that learning will get the cheese. There will be new are the new institutions that build o... |
at OUM started with the formation of an research team on m-learning in August 2008. Its first task was to determine how ready OUM learners would be for mobile learning. We surveyed almost 3,000 learners throughout Malaysia and found that more than 80 percent of the learners said they would be ready for learning through... |
experimented with podcasts and moved on to using sms to support the blended mode of learning at OUM and found that the latter worked extremely well. When it comes to changes in formal and informal learning, we may need to think about the pedagogy involved, where there may also be a shift from collaborative learning in ... |
in networks. There may also be a shift from cooperative learning in networks to collaborative learning in institutions when MOOC is formally institutionalized and accreditated in institutions. Does it address the difference between cooperation and collaboration learning in the networks/groups? In other words, these MOO... |
go along, but usually by one or more (less than 5?) individuals working as a group. As creators and conveners of the MOOC, what responsibility do they have for their creation and the resultant learning that takes place in the MOOC? Where does their responsibility begin and end? Does it matter? After seeing several MOOC... |
and go over the past couple of years, I've decided to play a part in a new one being facilitated by Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Is assessment always necessary in learning (in particular informal learning or social learning)? Can people learn effectively without being assessed? May be not, under a f... |
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