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The collision between U.S. and Russian communication satellites this week — the first such crash — has created speeding clouds of debris that threaten other unmanned spacecraft in nearby orbits, Russian officials and experts said.

The smashup 500 miles (800 kilometers) over Siberia on Tuesday involved a derelict Russian spacecraft designed for military communications and a working U.S. Iridium satellite, which serves commercial customers as well as the U.S. Department of Defense.

Continue reading MIT Technology Review

• The utility of sex, according to an intriguing new theory of evolutionary biology, may be its ability to promote genes that play well with many other partners rather than those that shine with just one specific set of genes.
• This idea of genetic mixability, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Nov. 24, hits on the difficulty evolutionary biologists have had in understanding sex, specifically its role in population genetics and Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest mantra.

Continue reading UC Berkeley News

• Around 100,000 students and graduates will get the chance to develop world-class skills as entrepreneurs and business leaders with the launch of the first University Enterprise Networks (UEN).
• The Networks are the first of their kind and will focus on the areas of science, technology, engineering, maths (STEM), innovation and the nuclear sector. The networks will be managed by the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE).
• The UENs will aim to establish a culture of enterprise in universities by providing training, advice and encouragement to students and graduates who want to develop their business ideas or wish to become innovative employees. Each network will be further supported by sponsorship from privately owned companies and Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). This will give students first hand experience of enterprising workplaces.

Source : The Oxford Trust

• Research Councils UK launched a scheme to help universities and research institutions fill skills gaps with scientists who have proven track records in industry and business. Funding of up to £5 million is being made available to recruit people into senior research and technology transfer.
• The Skills Gap Awards, to be administrated via the Medical Research Council, will apply to a range of sectors from which it has traditionally been hard to recruit.

• The MRC, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will be involved in a  six month pilot to ensure that appointments are made rapidly. Decisions will be taken within four weeks, and the will be provided to establish facilities or initial project support, while appointees seek formal grant funding. Co-funding from industry partners will be welcomed.

• In addition, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council will advance funding for an additional 20 four-year studentships in areas of ageing research, bioenergy, bioprocessing and environmental change.

Source : ScienceBusiness

• The universities of Cambridge and Oxford will accept the advanced diploma in engineering for entry to its undergraduate engineering courses.
• Diploma students could apply next year to start courses at the universities in 2010 but the numbers are expected to be very small.
• Students studying the diploma will need to include physics A-level and the A-level equivalent Level 3 certificate in mathematics for engineering as part of the additional specialist learning section.
• They will also be expected to demonstrate the same level of academic aptitude and potential as other candidates and undertake the extended project and principal learning elements of the diploma.
• University engineering departments have helped draw up the content of the new diploma to make sure it is robust enough to prepare students for degrees.

Source: The Guardian

If you own an iPhone, you can now be part of one of the most ambitious speech-recognition experiments ever launched. Google announced that it had added voice search to its iPhone mobile application, allowing people to speak search terms into their phones and view the results on the screen.

Continue reading MIT Technology Review

• Universities are not simply a mechanism for churning out a handful of elites and perpetuating social inequality but should be capable of empowering and equipping the largest possible number of individuals with the fullest set of tools she or he will need to become well-rounded participants in our social democracy and fully-functioning economic units in that society.
• They must also stand out – as many systems do today – as centres of world-leading, independent research, capable of preserving, developing and perhaps even expanding our valuable cultural and scientific legacy for generations to come.
• But seeking excellence in research should never be allowed to become an excuse for underperformance in education. Indeed, in the end both objectives require each other to be succes
• As the world moves towards a society where human capital is the largest and most basic determinant of a country’s economic success, the strongest systems are those which not only do the best job of educating the broadest number of their own citizens for the economic and social challenges we will face, but that themselves become magnets for the world’s talent.
• Universities should not only provide opportunity to the local country or community that sustains it, they must also attract the best and the brightest from around the globe

Source: ScienceBusiness

Systems biology will have obvious applications in medicine, such as in the rational design of pharmaceuticals, especially those involving several different molecular targets. It will also help in the development of drugs specific to small groups of people or even individuals, made possible by new insights from genome research. Outside medicine, systems biology is likely to have a big impact on agriculture and biotechnology and is expected to be a major contributor to Europe’s industrial future.

ERASysBio initiative -  a consortium of funding bodies, ministries and project management agencies. The mission is to carry out fundamental and strategic collaboration in the funding of systems approaches to biological research.

Source : ERASysBio

The National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Biotec) is to become a centre for R&D and training. Biotec will become a centre for excellence in biotechnology and, a training and research and development hub for neighbouring countries within the next five years.

Visit the website .

Source : Australia Education International