Craig Barrett, former CEO of Intel, delivered perhaps the most stinging indictment of the current political system. “There will be winners and losers, and the losers are the ones who insist on looking backwards,” said Barrett. “We continue to subsidize 19th century technology–like in the $290 billion farm bill–rather than the 21st century technologies that will allow us to remain competitive. We’re fat, dumb, and happy.”
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hefty increases at three science agencies–the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Last summer, legislation that incorporates many of those recommendations became law. But funding for most of the initiatives has yet to materialize.
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Speakers repeatedly pointed to those anemic budgets as evidence that politicians haven’t realized the threats to American preeminence in science posed by the rest of the world.

the inside out organization of the cephalopod eye relative to ours: they have photoreceptors that face towards the light, while we have photoreceptors that are facing away from the light. There are other important differences, though, some of which came out in a recent Nature podcast with Adam Rutherford, which was prompted by a recent publication on the structure of squid rhodopsin.

Superficially, squid eyes resemble ours. Both are simple camera eyes with a lens that projects an image onto a retina, but the major details of these eyes evolved independently - the last common ancestor probably had little more than a patch of light sensitive cells with an opsin-based photopigment. The general properties of this ancient eye can still be seen in modern eyes. They detect light with a simple molecule called retinal that is capable of absorbing a photon, changing its shape from the 11-cis form to the all trans form; basically, it flips from a chain with a kink to a straight chain. Retinal is imbedded in a protein called opsin. When retinal changes shape, it changes the shape of the opsin protein, too, which can then interact with other proteins in the cell membrane.

The next protein in the sequence is called a G protein. G proteins are ubiquitous intermediates for many cellular processes; when a receptor, like opsin, is activated, it activates a G protein, which then activates other proteins, starting a signaling cascade. In the podcast, I compare this to starting an avalanche. Opsin is an agent standing on a hill; when it receives a light signal, it nudges a small boulder (the G protein), which then tumbles down setting a whole series of rocks in motion. The G protein is an intermediate which takes a small change, the initial nudge, and amplifies it into the activation of many other proteins.

I actually thought that they were a lot about science. That’s what they tell the public. They are all about science and discovering new drugs. But as I started to follow their daily activities and talk to executives, I learned that really it was marketing that drove them.

According to Petersen, the rewards have been large. America has become the top consumer of prescription drugs in the world, with nearly 65% of the population on physician-prescribed medication. In 2005, Americans spent $250 billion dollars on such drugs. This consumption made pharmaceuticals the most profitable business sector in America from 1995-2002.
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We’ve come to a time when decisions on how to treat a disease have as great a chance of being hatched in a corporate marketing department as by a group of independent doctors working to improve the public’s health.

When scientists question facets of existing theories or propose new ones, they present the best evidence available and make the strongest arguments they can to their colleagues. Colleagues in turn challenge that evidence and reasoning. The rigor of this process is what makes science such a powerful tool.
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Lynn Margulis wrote a paper, “The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells,” which argued that eukaryotic cells – those with a true nucleus – arose when cells with no nucleus symbiotically incorporated other such cells to make new cells that could perform more functions. The paper was rejected by many journals, and when eventually published by The Journal of Theoretical Biology it was highly criticized. Margulis spent decades defending her work, but scientists now accept her suggested mechanism through which organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts evolved. Her suggestions about other organelles have not stood up to experimental tests, and are not as widely accepted.
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In 1982, Stanley Prusiner published an article on his research into scrapie – a disease in sheep related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease – which argued that the infectious agent was not a virus but a protein, which Prusiner called a “prion”. Because no one had heard of a protein replicating without a nucleic acid like DNA or RNA, many virologists and scrapie researchers reacted to the article with incredulity. When the media picked up the story, “the personal attacks of the naysayers at times became very vicious,” according to Prusiner. However, his critics failed to find the nucleic acid they were sure existed, and less than two years later, Prusiner’s lab had isolated the protein. Subsequent research provided even more support for prions, and in 1997 Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Everything that we measure is within the Universe, and we see no edge or boundary or center of expansion. Thus the Universe is not expanding into anything that we can see, and this is not a profitable thing to think about. Just as Dali’s Corpus Hypercubicus is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D object that represents the surface of a 4-D cube, remember that the balloon analogy is just a 2-D picture of a 3-D situation that is supposed to help you think about a curved 3-D space, but it does not mean that there is really a 4-D space that the Universe is expanding into.

Ninety years of industrial-scale exploitation of fish has, he and most scientists agree, led to ‘ecological meltdown’. Whole biological food chains have been destroyed.
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In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four years’ fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts, for just $4m a year. In 2006, access for 43 giant EU factory fishing vessels to Mauritania’s long coastline was bought for £24.3m a year. It’s estimated that these deals have put 400,000 west African fishermen out of work; some of them now take to the sea only as ferrymen for desperate would-be migrants to the Canary Islands and Europe.
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Protecting up to 40 per cent of the world’s oceans in permanent refuges would enable the recovery of fish stocks and help replenish surrounding fisheries. ‘The cost, according to a 2004 survey, would be between £7bn and £8.2bn a year, after set-up. But put that against the £17.6bn a year we currently spend on harmful subsidies that encourage overfishing.’
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The Newfoundland cod fishery, for 500 years the world’s greatest, was exhausted and closed in 1992, and there’s still no evidence of any return of the fish. Once stocks dip below a certain critical level, the scientists believe, they can never recover because the entire eco-system has changed.

Engineering positions are the most difficult jobs to fill for U.S. employers, according to Manpower Inc.’s 2008 Talent Shortage Survey released April 24. Of 2,000 U.S. firms responding, 22% said they had difficulty filling positions, ranking engineers, machinists/machine operators and skilled manual trades as the top three toughest positions to fill, respectively

In one year, the former hydraulic repairman will have a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University Calumet. And, as far as he can tell, he can write his own ticket.

“I’m finding jobs pulling at me left and right,” he said last week at a manufacturing industry job fair at the college. “The professors told us there’s such a demand, if you go to a job fair, you can walk out with a job.”

Vela, 35, happens to be in a field where demand remains strong, despite the uneven economy. Overall starting wages for mechanical engineering grads will be up 3.4 percent this year, with an average salary offer of $56,429, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. For many other college grads looking for a job at this time of year, the prospects are not as sweet.

It certainly pays to be a scientist. The statistics show that eight out of the highest 10 starting salaries go to graduates with science-related degrees. The other categories that do all right are graduates of economics and social work. The average starting salary for economics graduates is £24,466 and for social workers £22,560. Salaries for mathematics graduates are also firmly in the top 20.

It really does make sense to go into engineering, if you have the right A-levels because most engineering degrees lead to well-paid jobs. The aspiring chemical engineer can earn £25,136, and the civil engineer £22,392 in their first job. Engineering is better paid than computer science, widely regarded as a sensible option for those who are interested in technology.

Campus salaries in IT companies have jumped 17.6 per cent in the last two years across domains with 71 per cent of the students receiving salary between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 5 lakh.

This year, the average annual IT services pay packets have risen to Rs 2.74 lakh taking it closer to the average annual product company compensation (Rs 4.63 lakh) in the country, though some product companies pay almost 70 per cent higher salaries than services companies.

In a campus compensation and student perception survey brought out by CareerNet, a Bangalore-based recruitment company, it was found that while in financial year 2007, about 44 per cent of the students took home a sub-Rs 3 lakh per annum pay packet, this year only 12.6 per cent received salaries less than Rs 3 lakh.

And 17 per cent of the students managed to get more than Rs 5 lakh annual salary. Graduate hiring across all companies have increased by almost 50 per cent. Last year, about 15-20 per cent of the campus hires in the Big Five Indian IT services firms were science or computer science graduate, while this year, almost 30 per cent of those hired will be graduates.

>The market for engineers is relatively high, especially for mechanical engineers,’ he said with confidence, citing the presence of large employers such as NASA in Huntsville that have a continuous need for engineers.
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Participants in Shelton State’s technical programs, however, are unlikely to experience that problem anytime soon. Job Placement Center representative Mike Fields said about 95 percent of the 200 or so students about to graduate with two-year technical or associates degrees already have jobs. ‘On the technical side, the job market is still very, very strong, Fields said. ‘It’s been that way for some time.’