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  March 25, 2004: Highlights

102 recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching
President George W. Bush, NSF Acting Director Arden Bement, Jr., and John H. Marburger III, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, stand with 102 recipients of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, March 16, 2004. The award is America's highest honor that is presented to kindergarten to twelfth-grade mathematics or science teachers.
Credit: White House photo by Tina Hager

Nation's Best Mathematics and Science Teachers Visit Washington to Receive Presidential Award

Innovation, humor, expert knowledge of their subject and an ability to inspire student creativity are among the qualities common to the 95 mathematics and science teachers honored this week with the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST), the nation's highest commendation for work in the classroom. The National Science Foundation (NSF) administers the awards program for the White House. NSF is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of nearly $5.58 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions.
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image shows the surface electrostatic potential of a small molecule (alanine didpeptide)
This image shows the surface electrostatic potential of a small molecule (alanine didpeptide) calculated using accurate ab initio techniques. While producing similar results, DDASSL computations are at least a thousand times faster. Therefore, in the same amount of time as current computational drug-screening methods, DDASSL techniques can include additional chemical information and much more accurate descriptors, leading to better and more reliable predictions.
Credit: Curt Breneman, RPI

Virtual Screening Lab Zeroes in on New Drugs

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have come up with computational tools that serve as a virtual screening lab to help chemists weed through millions of possible drug candidates even before they dirty their first test tube. Chemist Curt Breneman, mathematician Kristin Bennett, and computer scientist Mark Embrechts developed faster and more accurate techniques for describing molecules and combined them with next-generation neural networks and learning methods as part of the Drug Discovery and Semi-Supervised Learning (DDASSL) project.
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Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development logo
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development logo

International Access to Research Data Critical to Advancing Science for the Public Good, Report Says

Open access to data resulting from publicly funded research is essential to advance science and the public good, but lack of consistency in government policies and within the scientific community hinders the open-access ideal, according to a report in the March 19 issue of the journal Science. Open access leads to greater long-term economic benefits, to better-informed government decision-makers and to accelerated progress in science itself, the report states. The report's international team of authors studied data-access issues on behalf of the 30-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
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laser beams cross in a glass cuvette
Two laser beams cross in a glass cuvette that holds a transparent liquid. Electrodes are suspended in the glass cell so that an electric field can be applied in the region where the laser beams interact with the molecules in solution.

Liquid Cell with Immersed Electrodes (from the New Additions Section in the NSF Image Library)

This image shows a cuvette made from quartz glass that researchers from Cornell University have used to observe a new electro-optic effect. A red and a blue laser beam from a femtosecond laser can be seen to cross in the cuvette between electrodes suspended from above and below. The light pulses are so intense that they cause the molecules in solution to emit radiation at the sum of the incident frequencies. Here the sum-frequency is in the ultraviolet and is not seen in the image. This nonlinear optical process is known as "sum-frequency generation." For symmetry reasons, sum-frequency generation can in a liquid only take place if the molecules are handed.
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