Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers have probed the inner parts of the disc of material surrounding a young stellar object, witnessing how it gains its mass before becoming an adult.

The astronomers had a close look at the object known as MWC 147, lying about 2,600 light years away towards the constellation of Monoceros ('the Unicorn'). MWC 147 belongs to the family of Herbig Ae/Be objects. These have a few times the mass of our Sun and are still forming, increasing in mass by swallowing material present in a surrounding disc.

MWC 147 is less than half a million years old. If one associated the middle-aged, 4.6 billion year old Sun with a person in his early forties, MWC 147 would be a 1-day-old baby [1].

Midwestern farming has introduced the equivalent of five Connecticut Rivers into the Mississippi River over the past 50 years and is adding more carbon dioxide annually into its waters, according to a study published in Nature by researchers at Yale and Louisiana State universities.

“It’s like the discovery of a new large river being piped out of the corn belt,” said Pete Raymond, lead author of the study and associate professor of ecosystem ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “Agricultural practices have significantly changed the hydrology and chemistry of the Mississippi River.”

The researchers tracked changes in the levels of water and bicarbonate, which forms when carbon dioxide in soil water dissolves rock minerals.

University of Alberta researchers in Edmonton, Canada, have developed a portable unit for genetic testing about the size of a shoebox, which has the same capability as a lab full of expensive equipment.

The device – along with other, even smaller units the team is now in the process of developing – paves the way for enormous savings to health-care systems and will improve care for patients. A wide variety of genetic tests that are available but not often used because their cost is prohibitive will become cheap, fast and easily accessible.

Prof. Christopher Backhouse, of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, together with Dr. Linda Pilarski, an oncology professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, and their research team, have received international recognition for the device.

While California has basic tracking system architecture in place to allow the state’s educators to closely follow the progress of students from kindergarten to post-secondary education, officials must overcome political and financial barriers, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.

The study shows that by developing such a data system -- known as a “student unit record” data system -- California policymakers and educators will be better equipped to create policies and adopt changes that decrease student dropout rates, encourage a smoother transition from secondary to post-secondary education and increase student retention in college.

Despite being the nation’s most populous state, California lags much of the country in tracking and the study finds that California would need to overcome a number of challenges to integrate a student unit record system, such as eliminating the protective mindset that each of the state’s four education segments has developed.

Prairie voles, aka Microtus ochrogaster, are common native rodents in the central U.S. and southern Canada. Because they mate for life and are relatively easy to study, the mouse-like creatures have been the subject of much research by scientists probing questions of monogamy and sexual faithfulness among mammals.

Steve Phelps, an assistant professor of zoology and one of the paper’s three authors, said many male voles pick a female partner and settle in a territory — often for life. A minority, however, shirks steady partners and home bases, instead ranging across other males’ turf and mating with other males’ females.

A more attractive dollar, better undergraduate science education in other countries and more common-sense application and approval rates for U.S. student visas has resulted in a 16 percent enrollment of first-time, full-time foreign graduate students on temporary visas studying science and engineering (S&E).

The increases in the past two years reflect a reversal of the declines in enrollments of new foreign S&E graduate students experienced after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

"The numbers indicate a rebound of first-time, full-time foreign S&E enrollment in U.S. graduate schools, which declined 19 percent between 2001 and 2004 after 9/11," said Project Officer Julia Oliver, of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which cosponsored the study with the National Institutes of Health.