2008: March 19th Good News ( Great Grandmother gets GED, Dinosaur Mummy in North Dakota, more!)

Hi All,
I apologise for my sabbatical. It was due to me leaving for Korea. I spent the last 2 days before I left enjoying time with my husband (who won't be here for a couple months), and packing. I departed on 17 March (and completely forgot to wear green, hahaha). I arrived on 18 March, and was able to start doing internet in durations longer than 5 minutes this afternoon. :) I still am not on the correct internal time clock, as it is 3:18 AM, and I'm WIDE awake. Hopefully I'll get into the zone soon. :)

Anyway, here are your articles for today. I will do my best to start updating daily again. Hope you enjoy, and see you tomorrow!


TOP 5:
1. Youth Activism is Surging, Spurred on By the Internet (Honolulu Advertiser)
2. HIV 'Switch' Research Offers Promise (Science Daily)
3. Student Adds to Scientific Gains (Honolulu Star Bulletin)
4. Paleontologists Awed By Dinosaur Mummy (San Fransisco Chronicle)
5. Great-grandmother Gets GED After Leaving School to Farm in 1940s (WNCT News 9)

Honorable Mentions:
1. Bank Customers Queue Round the Block as Cash Machine Pays Out DOUBLE Their Money! (Daily Mail)
2. Harvard Law, Hoping Students Will Consider Public Service, Offers Tuition Break (New York Times)




Top 5:

1. Youth Activism is Surging, Spurred on By the Internet
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080319/LIFE/803190356/1076
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
By Wendy KochUSA Today

Youth volunteerism is surging as high school and college students use the Internet to mobilize quickly and nationally.
More than 22,000 nonprofit groups have signed up to rally supporters on the teen-and-young-adult site MySpace since it began in 2004, says Jeff Berman, the site's executive vice president for marketing. He says more young people are engaged in activism online and their creativity in using the Internet to do good works is "off the charts."
Groups also have sprung up on Facebook, another social-networking site used by millions of students, to urge youth to fight global warming, help Hurricane Katrina victims, seek world peace or protest events such as charges brought against six black teens for beating a white classmate in Jena, La.
"Activism is at a very high level among college students, probably more than in the last 10 to 20 years," says Robert Rhoads, who teaches a class on the history of student activism at the University of California-Los Angeles. "There's a greater political consciousness among students," he says. "The Internet has played a role in that."
A growing number of college freshmen volunteer in their last year of high school, says John Pryor of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. He found in a survey that 83.3 percent did so last year, up from 66 percent in 1989. Some high schools make community service a graduation requirement, but 70 percent of those who volunteered were not required to do so.
Other youth activism:
Pay It Forward tours, in which students spend spring break doing community-service projects, were launched in 2003 by four University of Minnesota freshmen. In 2004, 43 students participated; this year, about 700 are doing so.
STAND, a student anti-genocide coalition, begun by Georgetown University students in 2004, has grown to about 800 chapters at high schools and colleges. It holds conferences to educate students and plans a march to the White House on April 13.




2. HIV 'Switch' Research Offers Promise
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080317094858.htm
ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2008)

If the battle against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is a chess match, then new research published March 17 gives new insight into one of the virus' most important moves.
The findings, by University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Michael Simpson and Roy Dar, with colleague Leor Weinberger who led the research at the University of California, San Diego, reveal new information about how a critical genetic switch in the virus operates. They are published as a letter in the upcoming issue of Nature Genetics.
When HIV infects an immune cell, it can enter one of two states: activation, where the virus replicates and then destroys the host cell; and latency, where the viral genetic material continues to exist in the cell, but there is no production of additional virus.
"While latency is a ticking time bomb," said Simpson, "a possible therapeutic goal could be to stably maintain latency indefinitely."
Previous work by Weinberger found that the genetic circuit that controls whether HIV chooses to go active or latent is not a simple "on-off" switch, but instead is controlled by a type of genetic pulse -- when the pulse lasts a certain amount of time, the switch will activate replication of the virus.
Now the three researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to manipulate the lengths of the pulses in a way that would favor the selection of latency.
This is vital, said Simpson, because the switch is a definitive factor in whether the virus will become active. If the pulse does not last long enough, he said, the virus cannot become active.
"This is an early step, but an encouraging one," said Simpson. "HIV has evolved a very effective infection strategy, so the name of the game is understanding how that strategy operates in order to find a way to defeat it."
A challenge of the work, according to Simpson, is that the process involved in how the switch operates cannot be directly observed. Instead, the researchers had to rely on an analysis of the "noise" created within the cell by the process to determine how it worked.
Simpson and Dar conducted their work in the Center for Nanophase Materials Science at ORNL, a recently opened facility that Simpson says has made this type of analysis possible.
Moving forward, the next step in the research is to determine whether it is viable to attempt to control the switch as part of therapeutic treatment for HIV. The researchers also hope to apply the techniques they used to understanding the operation of other types of human cells.
(Full article can be purchased at: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.116.html)
Adapted from materials provided by University of Tennessee at Knoxville.




3. Student Adds to Scientific Gains
http://starbulletin.com/2008/03/19/news/story10.html
Vol. 13, Issue 79 -
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
By Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.com

Philip Mocz has capped his high school senior year with one of the top awards in America's most prestigious science research competition.
The Mililani 18-year-old won eighth place and a $20,000 scholarship in the 2008 Intel Science Talent Search in Washington, D.C.
He was one of 40 finalists selected from more than more than 1,600 high school seniors who entered the competition.
Science Talent Search says its winners over the past 67 years have gone on to claim some of world's highest science and math honors, including six Nobel Prizes, three national Medals of Science, 10 MacArthur Foundation Fellowships and two Fields Medals.
This year's top award, a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation, went to 17-year-old Durham, N.C., student Shivani Sud.
She developed a model that analyzed the "molecular signatures" of tumors from patients with colon cancer and used the information to identify those at higher risk for recurring tumors and propose potential effective drugs for treatment.
Mocz received his scholarship award and a new laptop for designing and using a statistical algorithm to discover hidden patterns among nearby stars.
The title: "Dissecting the Nearby Universe: Monothetic Divisive Analysis Based on Voronoi Tessellations Reveals New Star Associations."
He also was a semifinalist in the 2007-2008 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology.
Philip and his sister, Lucia, a junior this year, have won numerous science awards in state and national competition.
Lucia won second place and Philip third place in the senior research category last year at the Hawaii State Science and Engineering Fair.
He also won the Best in Space Science Category Award in Astronomy and received a one-year scholarship to the University of Hawaii, a trip to Haleakala Observatory on Maui and several other prizes.
Lucia won four awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair last year in Albuquerque with her project, "Robot Vision: A Mutual Entropy-based Algorithm Through Scene Recognition from Image Sequences for Terrestrial and Planetary Exploration."
She won a $1,000 award in computer science, the top award of $1,000 from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence; $300 from the Association for Computing Machinery and $350 from the IEEE Computer Society.
In 2006, the siblings took top honors at the state science fair and led Hawaii's delegation to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Indianapolis.
Philip is graduating this year from Mililani High School and plans to study physics and math. He wants to go into astrophysics "as a professor or something," he said. "Hawaii has a great astrophysical facility at Mauna Kea."
He said he has been accepted at Stanford University and was offered a full scholarship at the California Institute of Technology, but hasn't decided where he will go.





4. Paleontologists Awed By Dinosaur Mummy:Scientists Working to Free Huge Fossil from its Rock Tomb
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/19/MNHJVLTOJ.DTL
Blake Nicholson, Associated Press
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.
Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65 million-year-old rock tomb.
"This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota.
"This is not the usual disjointed sentence or fragment of a word that the fossil records offer up as evidence of past life. This is a full chapter."
Animal tissue typically decomposes quickly after death. Researchers say Dakota must have been buried rapidly and in just the right environment for the texture of the skin to be preserved.
"The process of decay was overtaken by that of fossilization, preserving many of the soft-tissue structures," Manning said.
Tyler Lyson, a 25-year-old doctoral paleontology student at Yale University, discovered the dinosaur on his uncle's ranch in the Badlands in 1999. Weeks after he started to unearth the fossil in 2004, he knew he had found something special.
"Usually all we have is bones," Lyson said. "In this special case, we're not just after the bones; we're after the whole carcass."
Researchers have used the world's largest CT scanner, operated by the Boeing Co. in California and used to examine space shuttle parts, to get a better look at what is encased in the rumpled mass of sandstone.
Stephen Begin, a Michigan consultant on the project, said this is the fifth dinosaur mummy ever found that is "of any significance."
"It may turn out to be one of the best mummies, because of the quality of the skin that we're finding and the extent of the skin that's on the specimen," he said Tuesday.
Begin said several other dinosaurs with fossilized skin have been unearthed around the world, but only a handful have enough skin to be of use for research and education and in most previous cases the skin was considered to be of lesser importance. "The goal was to get bones to put on display," he said.
Dakota was moved to the museum early last month and is currently surrounded by precariously perched desk lamps and a machine to suck up dust. State paleontologist John Hoganson of the North Dakota Geological Survey said it will take a year, maybe more, to uncover it.
He said the main part of the fossil is in two parts, weighing a total of nearly 5 tons.
"The skeleton itself is kind of curled up," Hoganson said. "The actual length would be about 30 feet, from about the tip of its tail to the tip of its nose."
The fossil has spawned both a children's book and an adult book, as well as National Geographic television programs. The National Geographic Society is funding much of the research.
"We are looking forward to seeing what emerges from the huge dinosaur body block now housed in North Dakota," said John Francis, a society vice president.
Many prehistoric fossils have been found in the western North Dakota Badlands, where weather has heavily eroded the terrain over time. Hoganson said other treasures likely are waiting to be unearthed.




5. Great-grandmother Gets GED After Leaving School to Farm in 1940s http://www.wnct.com/midatlantic/nct/search.apx.-content-articles-NCT-2008-03-19-0020.html
Wednesday, Mar 19, 2008 - 11:56 AM
By Associated Press
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) -

A woman who spent only three days in eighth grade before deciding she'd rather work on her family's Stokes County farm in the 1940s finally has a diploma.
The Winston-Salem Journal reports that 79-year-old Ola Mae Venable earned a General Educational Development diploma on Tuesday when she passed her final math test.
The great-grandmother sailed through science, social studies and other tests, but math didn't come easily. Venable spent the last five months studying practice tests, working with a tutor to learn algebra and geometry.
Venable said she didn't know it would be quite so difficult, but she was determined to finish. She didn't want to drop out of school twice.
Venable now has six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. She hopes to inspire other adults who think they're too old to finish school.


Honorable Mention:

1. Bank Customers Queue Round the Block as Cash Machine Pays Out DOUBLE Their Money!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=539609&in_page_id=1770
Last updated at 14:43pm on 19th March 2008

Bank customers couldn't believe their luck when a cash machine began to double the money they requested.
Word quickly spread and from late yesterday afternoon to 8pm a large queue lined up to use the machine outside a Sainsbury's Local store in Hull, east Yorks.
The faulty machine finally ran out of notes at about 8pm.
Scroll down for more...
Two for one: Customers queue outside the cash machine in Hull last night which paid out twice the amount requested before running out of cash
It is also believed that a number of cash machines outside supermarkets in Hull also experienced similar problems.
One man who did not wish to be named said: "I was driving past when I saw a huge queue of about 30 people at the cash machine.
"I parked up and learned that it was paying out double. I joined the queue and when I finally got to the front I drew out £200 but it gave me £400.
Jackpot: Word of the fault spread quickly and more and more people began to queue outside the Sainsburys Local cashpoint
"The statement said I only drew out £200. I don't know whether I will have to pay it back."
Taxi driver David Mellors, 37, said he arrived at 7pm but by the time he got to the front, the cash machine had ran out of money.
"I was disappointed. It was the ultimate buy one get one free sale and I missed out," said the father of seven.
A spokesman for Sainsbury's said it had been alerted to the problem at about 8pm last night.
"We do not know how much the machine paid out at the moment but the matter is under investigation" she said.
One eye witness said: "It was really funny seeing all those people trying to get one over on the banks.
"They were walking away with huge wads of cash and big smiles on their faces.
"They were ringing their mates and telling them to get down quickly. It makes up for all the banks charges I guess. I hope they don't have to pay it back."


2. Harvard Law, Hoping Students Will Consider Public Service, Offers Tuition Break
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/18law.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
Published: March 18, 2008

Concerned by the low numbers of law students choosing careers in public service, Harvard Law School plans to waive tuition for third-year students who pledge to spend five years working either for nonprofit organizations or the government.
The program, to be announced Tuesday, would save students more than $40,000 in tuition and follows by scant months the announcement of a sharp increase in financial aid to Harvard’s undergraduates. The law school, which already has a loan forgiveness program for students choosing public service, said it knew of no other law school offering such a tuition incentive.
“We know that debt is a big issue,” said Elena Kagan, dean of the law school. “We have tried to address that over the years with a very generous loan forgiveness program, but we started to think that we could do better.”
For years, prosecutors, public defenders and lawyers in traditionally low-paying areas of the law have argued that financial pressures were pushing graduates toward corporate law and away from the kind of careers that they would pursue in the absence of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.
“The debt loads that people are coming out of law schools with are now in six figures,” said Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “When the debt load is that great, I have had a lot of applicants who’ve said, ‘I’d like to take the job, but I really can’t afford it.’ ”
Perhaps worse, Mr. Marquis said, some indebted young lawyers who choose to try to survive on a low salary as a junior prosecutor may decide to leave to earn more just as they gain enough experience to handle more important cases. For that reason, he added, Harvard’s program sounded like a “great idea.”
Harvard’s third-year-free program is expected to cost the law school an average of $3 million annually over the next five years, Ms. Kagan said, but that number is just an estimate because it is unclear how many students will take advantage of the offer. The law school’s share of the university’s endowment of $34.9 billion is more than $1.7 billion.
From 2003 to 2006, as many as 67 and as few as 54 of the 550 students graduating from Harvard Law went to work for a nonprofit organization or the government. That translates to 9.8 to 12.1 percent of the graduating class. A vast majority of students have chosen to join law firms, where they can earn well over $100,000 a year immediately after getting their degree.
“This is an interesting move,” Larry Kramer, dean of the law school at Stanford, said of the Harvard initiative. Compared with other loan repayment assistance programs, Mr. Kramer said, “It’s unclear whether it is more generous.”
It may be, he said, that loan forgiveness over a longer period of time may encourage more students to go into public service and stay there. He added that it would take time to see how students reacted to the program.
Brandon Weiss, 26, a third-year student at Harvard Law who plans to join a public-interest law firm after he graduates, said he thought the tuition waiver program might sway students concerned about their debt to consider more career possibilities.
“Some students come in and know that public interest is what they want to do,” said Mr. Weiss, who will not benefit from the program himself because it does not begin until next fall. “There are probably other students that know they want to go to a big law firm. This program will help those students who are in between.”
Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the law school of the City University of New York, said the waiver of tuition sounded like an ambitious experiment.
“Harvard Law School is an extremely expensive, elite law school,” Ms. Anderson said, adding that tuition at CUNY Law was less than $9,000 a year. For Harvard, she added, reducing the price “is a different way of trying to attract students” interested in public-interest jobs.
Harvard law students who want to participate in the program will have to demonstrate their commitment to public interest while in law school, through participation in clinical programs working with real clients or other activities and projects.
Students who are currently enrolled will get a partial benefit, with those who will be third-year students next year getting a $5,000 grant toward tuition if they commit to public interest, and second-year students, $10,000.
Students who clerk for a judge after they graduate will be able to count that year toward their five-year commitment. Graduates will still be able to take advantage of the existing loan-repayment assistance program.
Lawmakers have also begun paying more attention to the ways in which student debt deters graduates from going into public-interest careers. Legislation passed in the fall by Congress provides student loan forgiveness for public servants, like public defenders, librarians, teachers, firefighters and nurses, after 10 years of service.
A problem could arise for Harvard’s program if a student took the free year of tuition but then, at some point before the five years were up, decided to leave public-interest or government work to make more money. Ms. Kagan said the school would be ready for that because it already had to track graduates’ income under its existing loan forgiveness program, which provides assistance with loan payments to students in public-interest jobs.
If a student tried to switch to a high-paying job on the sly, Ms. Kagan said, “then we’re going to ask for the money back.”