National Science Foundation - News

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would be nearly 3 percent higher each year between 1959 and 2004--$284 billion higher in 2004 alone--if research and development (R&D) spending were treated as investment in the U.S. national income and product accounts, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on Friday. BEA and NSF partnered to produce these estimates as part of an ongoing activity to illustrate how spending on R&D affects U.S. GDP. More ...

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and NASA's upcoming Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) mission have forged a partnership designed to open the door for major discoveries. The GLAST-NOAO agreement will enable astronomers to propose for funding from GLAST to observe interesting objects in vastly different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. More ...

Astronomers studying archival data from an Australian radio telescope have discovered a powerful, short-lived burst of radio waves that they say indicates an entirely new type of astronomical phenomenon. More ...

Three National Science Foundation-funded biologists are among the 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2007: 1) Michael Elowitz, a molecular biologist at the California Institute of Technology; 2) Cheryl Hayashi, a spider silk biologist at the University of California, Riverside; and 3) Claire Kremen, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Berkely. Commonly known as the "genius award," the MacArthur Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards in the nation. More ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois used an innovative approach to reveal the molecular basis of altruistic behavior in wasps. The research team focused on the expression of behavior-related genes in Polistes metricus paper wasps, a species for which little genetic data was available when the study began. More ...

A study of 98 female North American red squirrels showed that personality did not impact parturition date or litter size. However, a female's activity was correlated with the growth rate of her offspring in the nest and overwinter. The magnitude and direction of the effects changed among life history stages and years, possibly in association with food supply. These results suggest that balancing selection may play a role in maintaining variation in personality in this population. More ...

High school students and teachers will join astronomers on the cutting edge of science under a program to be operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and West Virginia University (WVU), and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program, called the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, will engage West Virginia students and teachers in a massive search for new pulsars using data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). More ...

Two major steps toward putting quantum computers into real practice--sending a photon signal on demand from a qubit onto wires and transmitting the signal to a second, distant qubit--have been brought about by a team of scientists at Yale University. The accomplishments are reported in sequential issues of the journal Nature on September 20 and September 27. More ...

A three-year study that involved increasing the mercury load of an experimental lake and its watershed and then monitoring mercury concentrations in the watershed indicated that methylmercury (the type that accumulates in fish) was more readily produced from newly deposited mercury than from historical mercury contamination already buried in lake sediments. More ...

Deeper voice pitch predicts reproductive success in male hunter-gatherers, according to a new study from researchers with Harvard University, McMaster University and Florida State University. This is the first study to examine the correlation between voice pitch and child-bearing success, and the results point to a role for voice pitch in Darwinian fitness in humans. More ...