Congress Passes and President Signs Competitiveness Bill

H. R. 2722, the America COMPETES Act—which stands for America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science—has been passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. Focused on STEM Education, the law seeks to bolster education, opportunity, and innovation. Of particular concern is keeping America competitive in the global marketplace.

The bill does not, however, guarantee funds for the various components of the program, which creates new programs and expands some existing ones, and while the President did sign it, he also voiced concerns over the cost.

Details are available here.

NASSMC STEM Accelerator Initiative

The STEM Accelerator Initiative© is administered by the National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions (NASSMC), an alliance of 42 state coalitions of business, education, and public policy leaders working for comprehensive systemic change to improve STEM education for all students. The Accelerator Initiative answers an unmet need and occupies a unique niche in STEM education reform efforts by identifying, recognizing, and rewarding diverse programs with demonstrated positive impact on the STEM workforce pipeline. These programs flourish or die depending on whether or not they are recognized and supported. Specifically the Accelerator Initiative provides:

• An exclusive focus on growing the STEM pipeline across the education spectrum, from instilling basic knowledge in the early grades to increasing the pool of capable workers at the high school to increasing the number of college undergraduates entering the STEM disciplines
  
• Support only for those programs that can provide clear evidence of their effectiveness
  
• Support specifically intended to help successful programs become sustainable or to help sustainable programs scale
  
• A range of support services - not only financial but also partnership development, community relations assistance, and operational expertise as needed

In short, the Accelerator Initiative makes significant and varied investments in helping proven educational programs move towards the next stage of success.

For more information visit www.nassmc.org/sai.html.

KySat UHF/VHF Earth Station Successfully Tested

The KySat UHF/VHF Earth Station, a critical component of the KySat satellite on-orbit operations system, was recently successfully tested at Morehead State University. KySat team members made contact with the NASA GeneSat spacecraft.

KentuckySat (KySat) is a joint-enterprise involving public organizations, colleges and universities and private companies in a student led initiative involving the design, build, launch, and on-orbit operation of small satellites to promote science, technology and engineering, innovation, and education.

NASSMC member coalition the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation is the managing partner for KySat. Learn more about Kysat at www.kysat.com/.

Of Interest...

+ Paper battery offers future power: Flexible paper batteries could meet the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets, says a team of researchers. They have produced a sample slightly larger than a postage stamp that can release about 2.3 volts, enough to illuminate a small light.

Radar image of central Angkor area showing traces of irrigation channels, moats, and the extent of Angkor's urban sprawl. (Copyright: Nasa/JPL/University of Sydney)

+ Map reveals ancient urban sprawl: The great medieval temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia was once at the centre of a sprawling urban settlement, according to a new, detailed map of the area. Using Nasa satellites, an international team have discovered at least 74 new temples and complex irrigation systems. The map, published in the journal PNAS, extends the known settlement by 1000 sq km, about the size of Los Angeles. Analysis also lends weight to the theory that Angkor's residents were architects of the city's demise.

+ Commercial space station to launch before 2010: The world's first privately financed space station could be launched before 2010, a statement by Bigelow Aerospace suggests. The US company is accelerating its schedule to save money. Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, Bigelow Aerospace has successfully placed two inflatable spacecraft, called Genesis I and Genesis II, in Earth orbit. It wants eventually to launch habitable space stations for use by paying customers such as space tourists. The company had planned to orbit a third spacecraft called Galaxy in 2008 before lofting its Sundancer space station, able to support a crew of three, into orbit in 2010. But a statement by founder Robert Bigelow that was posted on the company's website on Tuesday says rising launch costs have pushed the company to forego the launch of Galaxy and bring forward Sundancer's launch.

+ Rubik's cube solvable in 26 moves or fewer: Just a month after checkers was "solved" by a supercomputer, the Rubik's Cube has been cracked too. Computer scientists Dan Kunkle and Gene Cooperman at Northeastern University in Boston, US, have proved that any possible configuration of a Rubik's cube can be returned to the starting arrangement in 26 moves or fewer. Kunkle and Cooperman used a supercomputer to figure this out, but their effort also required some clever maths. This is because there are a mind-numbing 43 quintillion (43,000,000,000,000,000,000) possible configurations for a cube - too many for even the most powerful machine to analyse one after the other.

+ The Sun flies like a bullet: Our solar system, which careers around our galaxy’s center at nearly half a million miles per hour, isn’t round. It isn’t even symmetrical. Instead, says George Mason University astrophysicist Merav Opher, the sun’s domain is shaped like a slightly squashed bullet and tilts up to 90 degrees away from the plane of the magnetic field of the rest of the Milky Way.

+ Watching the birth—and death—of an island: The first thing Swedish sea bum Fredrik Fransson noticed as he set out from the Vava’u Islands in Tonga last August was that the water was the wrong color. Instead of the familiar deep blue of the open ocean, the waters surrounding the Maiken were lagoon green. Then as the vessel continued westward, the surface of the ocean inexplicably turned to stone. “We looked out, and in front of us it was as if there was no more sea,” he recalls. “It was like the Sahara, with rolling hills of sand as far as the eye could see.” But the Maiken hadn’t run aground. Instead, she had sailed into a massive raft of floating pumice stone. No one on Earth knew it yet, but just a few miles away, the ocean floor was violently thrusting up fresh new land.

+ NASA's Mars-bound Phoenix adjusts course successfully: NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander today accomplished the first and largest of six course corrections planned during the spacecraft's flight from Earth to Mars. Phoenix left Earth Aug. 4, bound for a challenging touchdown on May 25, 2008, at a site farther north than any previous Mars landing. It will robotically dig to underground ice and run laboratory tests assessing whether the site could ever have been hospitable to microbial life.

+ Tiny wind engines cool computers: Minuscule wind engines could help to take computing power to the next level, scientists believe. US researchers have developed a prototype device that creates a "breeze" made up of charged particles, or ions, to cool computer chips. The "ionic wind", the scientists say, will help to manage the heat generated by increasingly powerful, yet ever-shrinking devices. The research is to be published in the Journal of Applied Physics.

+ Yawn to bond, study suggests: Some scientists say it boosts blood flow to the brain. Others think it helped our plain-dwelling ancestors coordinate group bed-time. Still others dismiss the phenomenon as a meaningless reflex. Now researchers studying yawning in autistic children have found evidence to support another theory - that communal yawning is a way of showing empathy with members of your group. The team was trying to understand "contagious yawning", the kind that happens when you see a colleague at a meeting stifling a yawn then find it almost impossible to hold one back yourself