Big City Students Make Gains in Math and Science, Report Says
Eight years ago, the National Science Foundation (NSF) undertook a bold initiative to encourage and invest in system-wide reform of K-12 mathematics and science education in some of the most disadvantaged urban school systems. Students in these systems were performing poorly in mathematics and science, with wide gaps evident between minority and majority students. NSF introduced Urban Systemic Initiatives (USI) to enable cities to implement wide-ranging reforms through standards-based curricula, professional development for teachers, and accountability for achievement through data collection and assessment. Now, an external evaluation team reports some dramatic payoffs to these investments. Academic Excellence for All Urban Students, a summary report on urban programs making up NSF's Urban Systemic Initiatives (USI), shows that students in the majority of the 22 cities where school systems undertook reform efforts are making progress in several areas.
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Important Pathogens and Cures Belong to Little-Known Group of Fungi
Researchers studying medicinal, pharmacological, antibiotic, carcinogenic and food-production agents would do well to look at an often-overlooked group of fungi that once had -- but then lost -- the ability to form lichen symbioses, according to a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded study published recently in the journal Nature. "The research challenges the common notion that mutualistic symbioses are endpoints of evolution," says James Rodman, program director in NSF's division of environmental biology.Using DNA sequence data, the scientists have determined a more accurate fungus family tree and reconstructed the evolution of lichen symbiosis. As a result, a little-understood group of lichen-forming fungi is now recognized as more important to humans than previously thought.
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Coral Record Connects Climate Change in Three Oceans
Coral extracted from a remote central Pacific island has helped NSF-funded scientists at California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography construct a valuable new record of climate conditions during the 20th century. The record, which allowed researchers to trace sea surface conditions over a 112-year-period, may hold implications for long-range climate forecasting and predictability, a result of the central tropical Pacific's influence on climate conditions around the world.
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Widespread Oceanic Photopigments Convert Light into Energy
A new energy-generating, light-absorbing pigment called proteorhodopsin is widespread in the world’s oceans, say scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Their discovery is reported in a recent issue of the journal Nature. Last fall in the journal Science, the MBARI researchers described the first marine bacterium with this photopigment that can generate cellular energy using light. "Advances in technology are letting us view the marine microbial world in new ways," said Ed DeLong, leader of the MBARI research group. Colleague Oded Béjà added, "We were lucky to find these different proteorhodopsins out there in the vast ocean."
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