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Yale Class of 2015

Class of 2015 admit rate lowest ever

In line with its peer institutions, Yale’s [...]

Princeton Class of 2015

Princeton makes offers to 8.39 percent of applicants in record admission cycle

Princeton University has offered admission to 2,282 students, or 8.39 percent, of the record 27,189 applications for the class of 2015 in what may be the most selective admission process in the University’s history. This compares with Princeton’s final admission rates of 8.8 percent [...]

Harvard Class of 2015

Harvard Accepts Record Low 6.2 Percent of Applicants to the Class of 2015
An all-time low of 6.2 percent of applicants were offered admission to the Harvard College Class of 2015, beating records for the sixth consecutive year in what reflects a trend of increasing selectivity both at Harvard and at other top-tier universities.

Notification letters were [...]

Harvard Announces Return of Early Action Admissions Program

Updated 2:10 p.m. | Harvard announced today that its non-binding early action admissions program will return this fall for the Class of 2016.

The program, which was eliminated in 2007 due to concerns that it posed a [...]

Princeton University to reinstate early admission program

Princeton University will reinstate an early admission program, beginning next year with the class that will enter Princeton in September 2012. The single-choice early action program will require applicants to apply early only to Princeton, but will not require them to decide whether to accept Princeton’s offer until the end of the regular admission process.

Messing with our planet

IN 1975 scientists expert in a new and potentially world-changing technology, genetic engineering, gathered at Asilomar, on the Monterey peninsula in California, to ponder the ethics and safety of the course they were embarking on. The year before, they had imposed on themselves a voluntary moratorium on experiments which involved the transfer of genes from [...]

Rewriting Macroeconomics Curriculum

IN MORE than 30 years of teaching introductory macroeconomics, says Alan Blinder of Princeton University, he has never seen interest as high as it was last year. At Harvard, says David Laibson, students in his undergraduate macroeconomics course are “chomping at the bit”.

Brown 2014

PROVIDENCE – Brown University said Thursday it admitted just 9.3 percent of those who applied to join its Class of 2014, making this the most selective year in the school’s history.

Princeton 2014

In the most selective admission process in the University’s history, Princeton has offered admission to 2,148, or 8.18 percent, of the record 26,247 applicants for the class of 2014. This compares to an admission rate of 9.79 percent at this time last year, and 9.25 percent the previous year.

MIT 2014

As MIT students celebrated π day this Sunday, 10,948 high school seniors waited nervously by their computers for the Class of 2014 admissions decisions.

Harvard 2014

A record-low 6.9 percent of applicants have been accepted to the Harvard College Class of 2014.

Yale 2014

Yale College admitted 7.5 percent of its applicants to the class of 2014, equaling last year’s record low rate.

Small island for sale

The takeover of Cadbury by Kraft seems to symbolise a hollowing-out of corporate Britain. The truth is rather more complicated. THE Thames Valley provides two contrasting examples of what happens when foreign companies buy British ones.

Coming up empty

THE renewable-fuel standard released in February by America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paints an ambitious picture of biofuels’ future. It wants the amount of the stuff used as transport fuel to climb from 13 billion gallons (49 billion litres) in 2010 to 36 billion gallons in 2022, requiring by far the largest part of that [...]

Stanford 2014

Admission decisions will, in fact, be released sometime after 3pm (Pacific Time) today, March 26, six days ahead of schedule.

Single Molecule Transistor

MANHASSET, NY — Researchers from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have successfully created a transistor made from a single molecule. The researchers showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

Rubber from Dandelions

The tyres of the future may be made from dandelions. OTHER than being an ingredient of the more recherché sorts of salad, herbal tea or wine, dandelions are pretty useless plants. Or, at least, they were. But one species, a Russian variety called Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), may yet make the big time. It produces molecules [...]

Native Flu Fighting Proteins

A team led by Harvard researchers has discovered a family of naturally occurring proteins in human cells that protect against influenza and other illnesses—a finding that may lead to methods to speed up vaccine production and to new flu prevention drugs for humans.

Wireless Electricity

Marin Soljacic couldn’t sleep. The problem was his wife’s Nokia cell phone. The tyrannical device beeped on the bedside table when it needed to be plugged in. It could not be disabled.

News vs Newspaper

How a new communications technology disrupted America’s newspaper industry — in 1845. CHANGE is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America’s newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business model that has served the industry for years. This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some [...]

Foundations of Economic Analysis

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.

Birds and Aviation Fuel Efficiency

Copying Birds may save aircraft fuel.

Source: The Economist. Photo: Corbis

Elephant Camps

All elephants living in Indian zoos and circuses will be moved to wildlife parks and game sanctuaries where the animals can graze more freely, officials said Friday.

Giant Crack in Africa

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

Diatoms

PORTLAND, Ore. — Diatoms–single-celled phytoplankton (algae)–are one of the most plentiful life forms on Earth, accounting for 20 percent of the carbon dioxide removed from the environment each year. The mechanism they use–encasing themselves in patterned silicon dioxide shells as they fall to the bottom of oceans and lakes worldwide–removes as much carbon dioxide from [...]

Car fuel from water

PORTLAND, Ore. — The hydrogen economy is getting a shot in the arm from a start-up that says its nanoparticle coatings could make hydrogen easy to produce at home from distilled water, and ultimately bring the cost of hydrogen fuel cells in line with that of fossil fuels. QuantumSphere Inc. says it has perfected the [...]

Bismuth Antimony Telluride

PORTLAND, Ore. — Thermoelectric coolers and power generators were handed a 40-percent boost in performance recently by a nanotechnological reconstruction of a classic bulk material. The technique is suitable for mass production, according to its inventors at Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Road Coloring Problem

After 38 years, Israeli solves math code.  A mathematical puzzle that baffled the top minds in the esoteric field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades has been cracked — by a 63-year-old immigrant who once had to work as a security guard.

Nanodots

Nanodots could yield denser memories, ceramic engine

PORTLAND, Ore. — Researchers at North Carolina State University said they were able to read and write bits at room temperature using magnetic nanodots that delivered 1 terabit of memory per centimeter2.

Man vs God

Wall Street Journal | September 12, 2009

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence.
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do!

FinFETs

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world.

Doomsday Seed Vault

UN chief Ban Ki-moon visited Wednesday a vault carved into the Arctic permafrost, filled with samples of the world’s most important seeds in case food crops are wiped out by a catastrophe.

Youngest circumnavigator

LONDON (Reuters) – A 17-year-old Briton became the youngest person to sail round the globe single-handed on Thursday after nine months at sea.

Biomimicry

An adhesive made by worms inspires a new treatment for broken bones.

Telescope turning 400

Celebrating 400th anniversary of Galileo’s Telescope.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14213985

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

Elephant Crossing

Wild elephants cross a road at the Kerala – Karnataka state border (Bandipur forest) in India. Photo by K. K. Mustafa | The Hindu | 19 August 2009

University Predating Harvard and Oxford

Built in 427 AD, world’s first university predating Harvard and Oxford.

At a summit meeting of leaders next week in the Philippines, senior officials from India, Singapore, Japan and perhaps other countries [...]

Bhuvan challenging Google Earth

Google Earth’s got some competition now — from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which today unveiled its beta version of Bhuvan (meaning earth in Sanskrit).

Mapping the world

Between GPS devices on your car’s dashboard and digital maps of almost any locale in the world on your smartphone or laptop, it’s hard to get lost these days.

Flying Frogs

A flying frog, the world’s smallest deer and the first new monkey to be found in over a century are among 350 new species discovered in the eastern Himalayas in the past decade, the WWF said Monday.

1 million mph

Stars in a distant galaxy move at stunning speeds — greater than 1 million mph, astronomers have revealed.

World’s Hottest Chili

BANGALORE – Red-hot chili peppers could soon come to India’s defense. The country’s defense scientists are working on using the world’s hottest chilies in hand grenades for use in counter-insurgency operations and riot control.

Diamond in the Sky

Solar Eclipse July 22, 2009 | New Delhi, India

Sailing solo around the world

Zac Sunderland completes solo sail around the world.

The 17-year-old from Thousand Oaks is the youngest sailor to complete the feat. The journey lasted 13 months.  Zac Sunderland, who left Marina del Rey 13 months ago with a bold ambition to become the youngest person to sail around the world alone, returned to complete that quest [...]

Largest English Newspaper

The Times of India Online has emerged as the world’s No.1 English newspaper website in terms of page views. According to the latest figures from internet marketing research company ComScore, timesofindia.com with 159 million page views in May 2009 was way ahead of the New York Times, Sun, Washington Post, Daily Mail and USA Today [...]

Lessons from Versailles

Henry Kissinger on Obama’s Opportunity to Forge a Peaceful U.S. Foreign Policy
SPIEGEL: Dr. Kissinger, 90 years ago, at the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Is that an event of the past only of interest to historians or does it still shape contemporary politics?

World’s Largest Database

Financial Times | Jonathan Leahy | June 26 2009

India plans ID cards for citizens

India’s government has launched one of the biggest bureaucratic exercises in the country’s history – the issue of a single identity card for each of its 1.1bn citizens.

Renaming Rhode Island

RAY HENRY | June 25, 2009 09:53 PM EST

Rhode Island Slavery Legacy Prompting Name Change

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The country’s smallest state has the longest official name: “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”

A push to drop “Providence Plantations” from that name advanced farther than ever on Thursday when House lawmakers voted 70-3 to let residents [...]

Half Dome Yosemite

Source:  yosemitehikes

Lincoln Stamp and Trading Ice

WASHINGTON: When the letter with the 90-cent Lincoln stamp was mailed in 1873 by an ice exporter in Boston to his office in Calcutta, Mohandas Gandhi (later Mahatma) was a toddler of four, Narendranath Dutta (later Swami Vivekananda) was a stripling of ten, and Ulysses Grant (later to visit Calcutta) was President of the United [...]

Wrath of Robigus

According to Roman legend, there once was a cruel boy who tortured a fox by tying straw to its tail and then setting the straw ablaze. The god Robigus was so outraged that he punished humanity with wheat rust, a fungal nightmare that leaves crops looking as though they had been burned.

Cracking Bernoulli Puzzle

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths puzzle that has stumped experts for more than 300 years, Swedish media reported on Thursday.

Nereus

The dive to 10,902m (6.8 miles) took place on 31 May, at the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, located in the western Pacific Ocean.

Goodbye Textbooks

Californian school kids have been told to throw away their textbooks to help the state avoid bankruptcy. But they won’t need total recall — they’re going digital instead. The textbooks have been terminated by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the bodybuilding state governor who says they are “outdated” and too expensive.

Global consumerism

BENIPUR VILLAGE, India — Advertisers in India can’t rely on TV, radio or even newspapers to reach the country’s 700 million rural consumers. So they use Sandeep Sharma.

800th commencement!

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2009061204

Enterprising generation

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4608799.cms

http://www.myyearbook.com/our_story.php

Bolt 9.97s

Usain Bolt ran the 100 metres in a breathtaking 9.77 seconds – the fastest time in the world this year – at the IAAF Golden Spike meeting in Ostrava.

iPhone Teardown

Whenever a new gadget hits the streets, it’s a race to see who will be the first to reduce to its constituent pieces. With the launch of the iPhone 3G S we’ve got a pair of different companies doing their darndest to disassemble the latest iteration of Apple’s iconic device. Frankly, I’d be happy to [...]