• Oberlin College fires professor who blamed 9/11, Charlie Hebdo attacks on Israel

    Joy Karega, an assistant professor at Oberlin College whose Facebook posts featured anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish global power and accusations that Israel was behind the 9/11 terror attacks and the creation of ISIS, was officially dismissed by the school’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday. The Board of Trustees found that Karega’s posts were in violation of the American Association of University Professors’ Statement of Professional Ethics, which requires professors to “accept the obligation to exercise critical self-discipline and judgment in using, extending and transmitting knowledge” and to “practice intellectual honesty.”

  • DHS seeking faculty, graduate, undergraduate students for summer 2017 research programs

    DHS is seeking faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students interested in participating in one of its 10-week programs in summer 2017, including its Summer Research Team Program for Minority Serving Institutions and its Homeland Security — Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (HS-STEM) Summer Internship Program. The deadlines for applying for both programs occur in December 2016.

  • NSF awards FSU $4.6 million grant to support cybersecurity scholars

    A new multimillion grant to the Florida State University Department of Computer Science will help dozens of students finance their education and help prepare them for careers in cybersecurity. The NSF awarded the department a $4.6 million grant to help fund the education of students who are specifically pursuing cybersecurity studies. It is the largest grant in the department’s history.

  • Math abilities are not innate, but rather depend on many factors

    The prevalent theory today suggests people are born with a “sense of numbers,” an innate ability to recognize different quantities, like the number of items in a shopping cart, and that this ability improves with age. A new theory regarding how the brain first learns basic math could alter approaches to identifying and teaching students with math learning disabilities. The researchers offer a better understanding of how, when, and why people grasp every day math skills.

  • Risk of student radicalization in Quebec low

    A new survey of CEGEP students found that the risk of violent radicalization among Quebec youth remains “very weak,” while incidents of racism and hate speech remain common. CEGEP is a network of publicly funded pre‑university colleges in the province of Quebec’s education system – similar to U.S. community colleges.

  • Some STEM fields have fewer women than others. Why?

    Women’s relative lack of participation in science, technology, engineering, and math is well documented, but why women are more represented in some STEM areas than others is less clear. Women now earn about 37 percent of undergraduate STEM degrees in the United States, but their representation varies widely across those fields. Women receive more than 40 percent of undergraduate degrees in math, for example, but just 18 percent of degrees in computer science.

  • Penn State cybersecurity club gets competitive

    The members of the Penn State Competitive Cyber Security Organization (CCSO) are embroiled in a game of capture-the-flag. They’re in hot pursuit of the pennant, hoping to find it before their competitors. But instead of dashing across fields and through the woods, they’re gathered in a conference room sharing pizza. And instead of searching for a brightly colored flag, they use their cybersecurity skills to find a “flag” that is actually a special computer file.

  • New $4 million facility at UW to investigate natural disasters worldwide

    A new Post-Disaster, Rapid Response Research Facility at the University of Washington will provide necessary instrumentation and tools to collect and assess critical post-disaster data, with the goal of reducing physical damage and socio-economic losses from future events. The NSF’s $40 million NHERI investment, announced in September 2015, funds a network of shared research centers and resources at various universities across the nation. The goal is to reduce the vulnerability of buildings, tunnels, waterways, communication networks, energy systems, and social groups in order to increase the disaster resilience of communities across the United States.

  • DHS awards U Texas San Antonio $3 million to develop, deliver cybersecurity training

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has selected a team led by the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to develop and deliver cybersecurity training through the Continuing Training Grants (CTG) Program. The 2016 CTG is a $3 million grant to develop and deliver cybersecurity training to support the national preparedness goal to make the United States more secure and resilient.

  • Muslim schoolboys in Switzerland must shake hands with female teachers

    Amer Salhani, a 15-year-old Muslim schoolboy a school in Therwil, Switzerland has been told by a Swiss education authority that he must agree to shake hands with female teachers or face being fined and disciplined. Salhani lost his appeal after refusing to shake hands with a female teacher in April because, he argued, it would have violated his religious beliefs. He, and other students who refuse to shake teachers’ hands, will now be fined up to £4,000 if they fail to comply with the order.

  • NIST’s regional approach to addressing U.S. cybersecurity challenge

    NIST has awarded grants totaling nearly $1 million for five projects that are taking a community approach to addressing the U.S. shortage of skilled cybersecurity employees. The NIST-led National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE), a partnership among government, academia, and the private sector, will oversee the grants as part of its mission to support cybersecurity education, training, and workforce development.

  • TEEX Center awarded $22 million through DHS national training program

    The Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) announced it will receive $22 million in federal funding for its National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center (NERRTC), which provides specialized homeland security and disaster preparedness training nationwide. Since it was established in 1998, NERRTC has enhanced preparedness by training more than 560,000 emergency responders, senior officials, public works staff, and medical personnel through delivery of more than 13,000 courses to state, local, tribal, and territorial jurisdictions.

  • Video games for STEM skills, diversity in middle schools

    An interdisciplinary team of researchers is launching an initiative which will use a custom-designed video game to boost computational thinking in middle school science classrooms. The goal is not only to improve educational outcomes, but also to foster gender and racial diversity in computer science and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

  • Cornell students hope to make the first CubeSat to orbit the moon

    Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell graduate and undergraduate students guided by Mason Peck, a former senior official at NASA, is attempting to boldly go where no CubeSat team has gone before: around the moon. The group attempting to make a first-ever moon orbit with a satellite no bigger than a cereal box, made entirely with off-the-shelf materials, and which uses water as a propellant. The Cislunar Explorers take part in NASA’s Cube Quest Challenge, which is offering a total of $5.5 million to teams that meet the challenge objectives: designing, building, and delivering flight-worthy, small satellites capable of advanced operations near and beyond the moon.

  • Training future problem solvers at DHS Centers of Excellence

    DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) says that focusing on the future does not just mean focusing on the technology, research, and development. Focusing on the future also includes the specialized research and education programs at the university-based DHS Centers of Excellence (COEs). It is this approach that has led S&T’s Office of University Programs (OUP), which manages the COEs, to offer grants, internships, and summer research experiences to help undergraduate and graduate students and recent graduates gain real-world exposure to homeland security challenges both in the field and in the lab.