With the assistance of a five-year $20 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Chemical Bonding Center (CBC) project, called "Powering the Planet," will increase the number of its collaborators to fulfill its goal of efficiently and economically converting solar energy and water into hydrogen and oxygen fuels.

The hydrogen and oxygen gases produced will be usable by a fuel cell, where they will react to reform ...

The geysers of Yellowstone National Park owe their eistence to the "Yellowstone hotspot"--a region of molten rock buried deep beneath Yellowstone, geologists have found.

But how hot is this "hotspot," and what's causing it?

In an effort to find out, Derek Schutt of Colorado State University and Ken Dueker of the University of Wyoming took the hotspot's temperature.

The scientists published results of their research, funded by the National Science ...

It's bad enough that I haven't found a mate. I'm also hungry and I'm losing stamina. I've lost the rest of my group and a large grizzly bear has positioned himself across my path. What's a wolf to do?

Adopting the identity of a wolf is the key to learning about wolf behavior and ecology in WolfQuest, a computer game developed and hosted by the Minnesota Zoo with funding from the National Science Foundation. WolfQuest is one example of how, through computer gaming technology, learning ...

DNA barcoding is a movement to catalog all life on earth by a simple standardized genetic tag, similar to stores labeling products with unique barcodes. The effort promises foolproof food inspection, improved border security and better defenses against disease-causing insects, among many other applications.

But the approach as currently practiced churns out some results as inaccurately as a supermarket checker scanning an apple and ringing it up as an orange, according to a new Brigham ...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Geosciences has appointed Robert Detrick of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) as its new director of the Division of Earth Sciences.

Detrick is currently a senior scientist and vice president for Marine Facilities and Operations at WHOI, and will begin his NSF position on Nov. 3, 2008.

"We are delighted that Bob Detrick will be joining NSF in this important national leadership role," said Tim Killeen, ...

Federal funding of academic science and engineering research and development (R&D) failed to outpace inflation for the second year in a row, according to recently released fiscal year (FY) 2007 data from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The data from NSF's Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges showed an increase in federally funded expenditures of 1.1 percent in current dollars to $30.4 billion, but after adjusting for inflation, the ...

Alfred Wilson, an employee in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Education and Human Resources Directorate, has been recognized by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) as a HealthierFeds Leader for his passion for health and fitness, extensive volunteer work in the NSF Fitness Facility, dedication to promoting employees' health improvement and his notable contribution to creating a healthier workplace.

In spotlighting Wilson, OPM recognized that Wilson's leadership led to ...

New research, reported this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that coal burning, primarily in North America and Europe, contaminated the Arctic and potentially affected human health and ecosystems in and around Earth's polar regions.

The study, titled "Coal Burning Leaves Toxic Heavy Metal Legacy in the Arctic," was conducted by the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Reno, Nev. and partially funded by the ...

The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has established four new Expeditions in Computing. Each of these $10 million grants will allow teams of researchers and educators to pursue far-reaching research agendas that promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.

"We created the Expeditions program to encourage the research community to send ...

The summer games in Beijing may have just gotten underway, but the United States can already claim gold medal bragging rights. The sixth International Linguistics Olympiad ended today in Slanchev Bryag, Bulgaria, and U.S. high school students captured 11 out of 33 awards, including gold medals in individual and team events. This was only the second time the U.S. has ever competed in the event. Their achievement brings a new focus on computational linguistics.

This year's Olympiad ...

The first scientific mission with Sentry, a newly developed robot capable of diving as deep as 5,000 meters (3.1 miles) into the ocean, has been successfully completed by scientists and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of Washington (UW).

The vehicle surveyed and helped pinpoint several proposed deep-water sites for seafloor instruments that will be deployed in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s planned Ocean Observatories ...

The National Science Board (NSB) will hold the fourth of its six annual meetings related to national science and engineering policy issues and oversight of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from August 12-13, in Arlington, Va.

The highlight of the meeting will be a presentation by the NSB's 2008 Vannevar Bush Awardee Norm Augustine on the state of the American science and engineering enterprise in the global economy. The Vannevar Bush Award is the most prestigious award for ...

As the Summer Olympics in Beijing kicks off this week, the event is giving scientists a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe how the atmosphere responds when a heavily populated region substantially curbs everyday industrial emissions.

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded "Cheju ABC Plume-Monsoon Experiment" (CAPMEX) will include a series of flights by specially equipped unmanned aircraft known as autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs).

The aerial ...

We don't have spacecraft to take us outside our solar system--not yet, at least. Still, astronomers thought they had a pretty good understanding of how our solar system formed and in turn, how others formed. In the last dozen years, nearly 300 exoplanets have been discovered. Are the solar systems in which they reside indeed like our own? Without knowledge or observations to the contrary, conventional knowledge said yes. Three Northwestern University researchers questioned that assumption ...

Approximately 15 professors, deans and other professionals in the computing sciences from the People's Republic of China came to Arlington, Va. last month for a summit with their U.S. counterparts. The one-day meeting gave participants the chance to discuss challenges and opportunities facing computing scholars from both sides of the Pacific, and it reflected the growing level of cooperation between the academic research communities in both countries.

The event was organized by the ...

Instead of using a flat microchip as the light sensor for their new camera, a team of engineers has developed a sensor that is a flexible mesh of wire-connected pixels.

The mesh is made from many of the same materials as a standard digital-camera sensor, but has the unique ability to conform to convoluted, irregular surfaces.

The technology is already showing promise for photography, as the researchers conformed the array to a hemispherical shape and incorporated the device into ...

Cora Marrett, NSF's assistant director for the Education and Human Resources directorate, is this year's winner of the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award. Created in 1971, the award honors the intellectual traditions and contributions of Oliver Cox, Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier. The award is given annually to either a sociologist for a lifetime of research, teaching and service to the community or to an academic institution for its work in ...

National Science Foundation-funded scientists working in an ice-free region of Antarctica have discovered the last traces of tundra--in the form of fossilized plants and insects--on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began a relentless drop millions of years ago.

An abrupt and dramatic climate cooling of 8 degrees Celsius, over a relatively brief period of geological time roughly 14 million years ago, forced the extinction of tundra plants and insects and ...

National Science Foundation-funded scientists working in an ice-free region of Antarctica have discovered the last traces of tundra--in the form of fossilized plants and insects--on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began a relentless drop millions of years ago.

An abrupt and dramatic climate cooling of 8 degrees Celsius, over a relatively brief period of geological time roughly 14 million years ago, forced the extinction of tundra plants and insects and ...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a solicitation that represents a partnership between NSF and the Department of Defense (DoD) to support basic research projects that can address areas of strategic importance to national security as one part of DoD's Minerva Initiative launched in the spring by the Secretary of Defense.

The solicitation follows a Memorandum of Understanding signed by NSF and DoD in June that facilitates support of such research collaborations.

The ...

Using a surprisingly simple, inexpensive technique, chemists have found a way to pull pure oxygen from water using relatively small amounts of electricity, common chemicals and a room-temperature glass of water.

Geoscientists have long presumed that, like today, the tropics remained warm throughout Earth's last major glaciation 300 million years ago.

New evidence, however, indicates that cold temperatures in fact episodically gripped these equatorial latitudes at that time.

Geologist Gerilyn Soreghan of Oklahoma University found evidence for this conclusion in the preservation of an ancient glacial landscape in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado. Three hundred million years ago, ...

The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate announces a grant award to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to help establish an experimental computing cluster at the UIUC campus. The NSF Cluster Exploratory (CluE) initiative was first announced in April 2008 to provide NSF-funded researchers access to software and services running on a Google-IBM cluster. The UIUC award together with funding and equipment ...

A team of researchers, at Princeton University's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center and from the Universities of Michigan and Florida, has observed electrons moving through a crystal of bismuth metal behaving like light.

This discovery, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and detailed in today's edition of the journal Science, could lead to new kinds of electronic devices.

Electrons, or the particles of electricity, fly through space like ...

A team of researchers at Princeton University's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center has observed electrons moving through a crystal of bismuth metal behaving like light.

This discovery, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and detailed in today's edition of the journal Science, could lead to new kinds of electronic devices.

Electrons, or the particles of electricity, fly through space like tiny baseballs. Alternatively, when an electron speeds ...