President George W. Bush meets with Arden L. Bement, Jr., in the Oval Office of the White House on Sept. 15, 2004. Image credit: Paul Morse, White House

President Bush Announces His Intention to Nominate Arden L. Bement, Jr., for NSF Director
President George W. Bush announced on Sept. 15, 2004, his intention to nominate Arden L. Bement, Jr., to be the director of the National Science Foundation for the remainder of a six-year term ending August 2, 2010. Currently, Dr. Bement serves as Acting Director of NSF, a position he has held since Feb. 22, 2004, and as director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He has been NIST's director since Dec. 7, 2001. Previously, he served as the David A. Ross Distinguished Professor of Nuclear Engineering and head of the School of Nuclear Engineering at Purdue University. He earned his bachelor's degree from the Colorado School of Mines, his master's degree from the University of Idaho, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. (posted September 21, 2004)

In this artist's conception, a newly discovered planet the size of Neptune orbits the cool, reddish M-dwarf star Gliese 436 Credit: NASA/G. Bacon

Astronomers Find New Class of Planets Outside the Solar System—Two new "Neptunes" are the smallest extra-solar planets yet—but could be the first of many
A team of astronomers has announced the discovery of some of the smallest planets yet detected beyond our solar system: two worlds that represent a new category of extra-solar planets, as well as significant and much-anticipated advance in the hunt for such objects. Each of the newly discovered planets is roughly comparable to the planet Neptune in our own solar system, says Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, a veteran planet-hunter and a co-discoverer of this pair. That’s still pretty big on a terrestrial scale, he says: Neptune has 17 times the mass of the Earth. But it’s tiny compared to the 120-plus extra-solar planets that have been discovered to date.
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Takoradi Technical Institute's fab lab has a special class for female students each week in which they learn how to make arts, crafts and 3-D objects with the computer and tabletop laser cutter. Planned classes for August and in fall 2004 for female students will include making electronic components. Credit: Amy Sun, Center for Bits and Atoms, MA

MIT Fab Labs Bring "Personal Fabrication" to People Around the World
Fluorescent pink key chains may not immediately call to mind "high-tech," but for students in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana, key chains designed and manufactured by their own hands on modern fabrication tools represents the first link from the high-tech world to the world they live in. In July and August, a team from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) deployed its sixth field "fab lab," based on the campus of the Takoradi Technical Institute in the sister cities of Sekondi and Takoradi in Ghana's southwest corner. Members included CBA program manager Sherry Lassiter, CBA's director, Neil Gershenfeld, and graduate students Amy Sun and Aisha Walcott.
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3d-structure of mitochondria in mammalian cells recorded with the Leica TCS 4PI; comparison of (a) the 4Pi mode and (b) the standard confocal mode of microscopy The 4Pi mode allows scientists a much clearer view. Credit: Joerg Bewersdorf, Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Goettingen, Germany

NSF Funds First U.S-based 4Pi-Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope—New technology will open doors in biophysical research and education
The 4Pi-Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope is world's most advanced light-based microscope—capable of revealing the structure of genetic material within a cell in three dimensions. The first such instrument is now coming to the United States, thanks to a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to a Maine interdisciplinary biophysical research program. The Institute for Molecular Biophysics (IMB) brings together expertise in biophysics and engineering at the University of Maine in Orono, molecular and cell biology at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute in Scarborough, and genetics and genomics at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor. The program's goal: to explore the structure and function of genes and chromosomes within cells in order to understand precisely how genes control both normal development and disease.
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Complex Cells Likely Arose from Combination of Bacterial and Extreme-Microbe Genomes—New “ring of life” points to mergers and acquisitions between cells

One of science's most popular metaphors, the "tree of life," (left) with its evolutionary branches and roots, turns out to be a misnomer and is instead a ring (right), according to UCLA molecular biologist, James Lake. Credit: National Science Foundation.

According to a new report, complex cells like those in the human body probably resulted from the fusion of genomes from an ancient bacterium and a simpler microbe, Archaea, best known for its ability to withstand extreme temperatures and hostile environments. The finding provides strong evidence that complex cells arose from combinations of simpler organisms in a symbiotic effort to survive. Jim Lake and Maria Rivera, at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA), report their finding in the Sept. 9 issue of the journal Nature.
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