Schools 4 Online

Governor ESL Narsimhan has emphasised the need for quality education for students in universities.

“Our universities manage to produce a large number of Ph.Ds. But what about the value of these degrees? If we do not fix the problem of quality we will face the prospect of being left behind in a world racing towards a knowledge society?” he said.

He was speaking at the 78th annual convocation of the Osmania University held at the Tagore Auditorium here on Tuesday.

“The great challenge before the universities is to access this knowledge and to mould it in a manner amenable to our societal needs and requirements. If this challenge can be successfully met, India can maintain its intellectual leadership and occupy its rightful place among the comity of nations. I believe that we could together strive to change the things for the better and to make ours a great nation,’’ he said.

Vice-Chancellor of Osmania University T.Tirupati Rao speaking on the occasion focussed on the achievements and initiatives of the university. continue reading…

As part of the 1Goal global campaign coinciding with the FIFA Football World Cup 2010, hundreds of social activists, educationists, students and sportspersons have started a signature drive in Orissa, seeking education for all, a campaigner said Tuesday.

The drive was kicked off here Monday by international football player and former captain of Indian women football team, Sradhanjali Samantaray.

It would continue till June 22, Santosh K. Padhy of international NGO ActionAid told IANS.

The participants signed on an appeal that asks Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to increase budgetary allocations for elementary education, he said.

Around 100 organisations in the state have already joined the drive. continue reading…

Numerous researchers in MSU’s College of Education have endorsed a set of high school graduation standards approved last week that proponents said will better prepare students for college.

The Common Core State Standards were approved June 2 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, as well as teachers and administrators nationwide.

Among other changes, the standards would put increased emphasis on writing and align Michigan’s education standards with those in other states on a national level. continue reading…

In a super-competitive job market that puts a premium on specialized knowledge and skills, opportunities for continuing education have never been more vital to D.C. area residents. Now even the busiest would-be students can find education and training—literally at their fingertips—in more than 1,000 online courses offered by the Continuing Education program at CCDC.

The College designed its Continuing Education program for learners of all ages, whether they want to update their professional skills, earn a certificate to help launch a new career, or just enjoy the chance to explore something exciting and new. From website design to wedding planning, from income tax preparation to positive parenting, there’s a class for every interest.

“Our online courses open doors to personal, professional, and civic growth,” says CCDC Continuing Education Director Neil Richardson. “We’ve placed special emphasis on skills for work in the region’s hottest industries, but we cover the full range of subjects for both personal and professional development.” continue reading…

To hear Sally Field tell it, reversing bone loss with the drug Boniva is important because you have only “one body and one life.” And the 63-year-old actress—who looks around 45 in commercials for the bone-building drug—implies that many, if not most, healthy and fit middle-aged women are on the road to osteoporosis.

They’re not.

According to the National Osteoporosis Foundation, about 10 million Americans have osteoporosis, 80 percent of them women, but an additional 34 million have “low bone mass” that puts them at increased risk. Sally Field is in the former group, but many women in the latter category, experts contend, are being unnecessarily treated with bisphosphonate drugs like Boniva, Fosamax, or Actonel.
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New reaction cleaves dinitrogen, brings carbon and nitrogen together
To break some chemical bonds you need to know a guy, who knows a guy who knows a compound. Scientists ordered just such a hit and have broken two of the toughest bonds in chemistry in the laboratory equivalent of broad daylight. The reaction yields a new chemical connection and could lead to more direct routes for making various drugs or other biologically important compounds.

In the new work, a metal complex and carbon monoxide conspire to cleave the triple bond that connects two nitrogen atoms, one of nature’s strongest chemical bonds. Busting apart bonded nitrogen has always been a daunting task. Even when accomplished, it hasn’t necessarily yielded useful products.
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Pattern of chemical tags on DNA linked to the autoimmune disease
Lupus can tell identical twins apart by the distinguishing marks the pairs carry on their DNA.

Fewer DNA methylation marks may leave one twin vulnerable to the inflammatory autoimmune disease, even while the other sibling remains healthy, a new study appearing online December 22 in Genome Research shows.

The finding suggests that environmental factors determine whether genetically susceptible twins will contract lupus, or systemic lupus erythematosus, which is characterized by the immune system attacking the body’s own cells.

Researchers have previously identified at least 17 different genes involved in lupus. If genes alone were responsible for determining whether a person gets lupus, then every time one identical twin got the disease, the other should too.
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Viral hitchhiker has been hanging on in mammalian genome for more than 40 million years
People may not be quite the humans they think they are. Or so suggests new research showing that the human genome is part bornavirus.

Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, can insert their genetic material into human DNA and first did so at least 40 million years ago, the study shows. The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.
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Scientists have discovered the true identity of a contagious form of cancer that is killing Tasmanian devils. The cancer, called devil facial tumor disease, stems from cells that normally insulate nerve fibers, a new study shows.

Genetic analysis of tumors taken from infected devils in different parts of Tasmania reveals that these insulating cells, known as Schwann cells, became cancerous in a single Tasmanian devil and have since passed to other devils, an international group of researchers reports in the Jan. 1 Science.

Previously, scientists had suspected that a virus might be the source of the infection, but the new study confirms that cancer cells themselves are transmitted from devil to devil.

Knowing the origin of the contagious tumors could help conservationists diagnose the disease more accurately and may eventually lead to a vaccine that would target tumor proteins, says Katherine Belov, a geneticist at the University of Sydney who was not involved with the project.
A vaccine against the facial tumor disease, “while now pie in the sky, in 10 years might not be,” says Gregory Hannon, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. “Ten years might be enough time” to save the devils from extinction, he says.

About 70 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has disappeared as a result of the disease, and if the current rate of decline continues, devils could become extinct in the wild in 30 to 50 years, says Elizabeth Murchison, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England. Murchison, a native of Tasmania who grew up seeing devils in the wild, led the project while working in Hannon’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor. “I didn’t want to sit back and let the devils disappear,” she says.
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Fossilized footprints found in an abandoned quarry in Poland hint that four-limbed creatures called tetrapods evolved much earlier and in a radically different environment than previously thought.

The footprints — many individual impressions, as well as some arranged in sets called trackways — are preserved in 395-million-year-old rocks in the Holy Cross Mountains, in the southeastern part of the country, paleontologist Per E. Ahlberg and colleagues report in the Jan. 7 Nature. That age substantially predates the time frame that paleontologists have pinned as the sea-to-land transition.

Evidence suggests that the carbonate rocks were laid down as sediments in the intertidal areas of a tropical shoreline, possibly in a lagoon, says Ahlberg, of Uppsala University in Sweden.
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