U.S.

Ballmer wants to make Harvard's computer science department the best in the world

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has given Harvard University an unknown amount of money to significantly expand the school’s computer science department, it was announced Thursday.

Ballmer, now owner of the NBA’s L.A. Clippers, graduated from Harvard College in 1977. He said in a statement that Harvard’s computer science department is “small, but excellent,” and believes a faculty expansion will allow the university to build a preeminent program. Harvard President Drew Faust said in a statement that “we’re so grateful for Steve’s game-changing support and welcome this opportunity for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to take full advantage of the entire University’s distributed strengths.”

While Harvard nor Ballmer disclosed the exact amount of the gift, Ballmer told The New York Times that it would allow Harvard’s computer science faculty to expand from its current number of 24 to about 35.

Though Harvard is top-ranked as a national university, its computer science program is ranked at number 18, behind programs at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley, which are tied for the top spot, according to U.S. News & World Report. Still, Harvard undergraduates have demonstrated a rising interest in computer science, with the number of students concentrating in the field more than doubling between 2009 and 2013, according to the university’s handbook for students. A record-breaking 818 students enrolled in Harvard’s popular introductory computer science class, CS50, this semester.

Cold air will blanket two-thirds of the U.S. on Thursday, with arctic air expected to take aim at the East Coast after ripping through the rest of the county. The National Weather Service said temperatures will plummet to 25 to 40 degrees below normal across much of the northern and central U.S. New England is expected to experience light snow, but up to a foot of snow is expected to fall in the Great Lakes region.

The polar invasion is expected to linger through the middle of next week, according to The Weather Channel. It tore through the Plains and Midwest earlier this week, sending temperatures plummeting and shattering record lows…

Read the rest of the story from our partners at NBC News

Read next: Winter is Here: See the First Major Snow Storm of the Season

In settling, the firm said it was seeking to avoid a protected legal battle

Monsanto agreed Wednesday to pay almost $2.4 million to settle a lawsuit filed by U.S. wheat farmers, after a genetically modified strain of the grain was found in an Oregon field and spooked importers of American wheat.

No genetically engineered wheat has been approved in the U.S., but in 2013 wheat matching a strain of an experimental type developed and tested by Monsanto a decade earlier was found growing in a field in Oregon, the Associated Press reports. The modified wheat was not approved by federal regulators, and the seed juggernaut had said it had destroyed the crop.

A government report judged the incident to be an isolated case, but it did not conclude how the errant wheat had come to be in the field. Nations wary of genetically modified crops were alarmed: Japan and South Korea briefly stopped importing American wheat, and American farmers cried foul over the damage done to their revenues and reputations.

The St. Louis–based company’s settlement includes giving $2.1 million to farmers in the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho who sold soft white wheat between May 30 and Nov. 30 of 2013, as well as paying $250,000 to multiple wheat growers’ associations.

[AP]

Boy was left in vehicle for over seven hours

A Connecticut man whose 15-month-old son died of hyperthermia after being left in a hot car for hours was arraigned Wednesday on charges of negligent homicide.

MORE: Who’s at fault when a child dies in a hot car?

Thirty-six-year-old Kyle Seitz was free to leave the courtroom, but Superior Court Judge Dan Shaban ordered him to surrender his passport and remain in Connecticut, Reuters reports.

Shaban also ruled that Seitz was to have no unsupervised contact with his two daughters, who are now living with their mother.

Seitz says he had forgotten that he was supposed to take his son Benjamin to day care and did not realize the boy was still in his car seat as he went to work on July 7.

The chief state medical examiner’s office in August said temperatures inside the car that day would have reached 88°F, causing Benjamin to succumb to “hyperthermia due to environmental exposure.”

Seitz is due to reappear in court on Nov. 21.

In the U.S. in 2013, 44 children died of heat stroke in cars, and more than 600 have died since 1998.

[Reuters]

The bison were due to be slaughtered but instead are being returned to the park to help with conservation efforts

(BILLINGS, MONT.) — A group of Yellowstone National Park bison is due to finally arrive at a permanent home on a northeastern Montana American Indian reservation on Thursday, almost a decade after they were captured and spared from slaughter.

About 100 of the 138 animals were loaded onto trucks late Wednesday to travel overnight to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, home to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes.

All of the bison were set to make the trip Wednesday, but one of the trucks broke down. The remaining bison will begin their journey Thursday.

The small herd will help tribal members regain a connection to an animal that helped shaped their ancestors’ nomadic existence, tribal officials said.

Bison, also known as buffalo, still play a central role in many ceremonies for Plains Indian tribes.

The Yellowstone animals will be “welcomed with prayers,” said Tom Escarcega, one of a group of Assiniboine and Sioux tribal leaders who planned to escort the animals to Fort Peck.

“It starts to bring back our ceremonies that we kind of forgot,” Escarcega said. “In our culture, we treat the buffalo as a people, and we’re the two-legged nation. They deserve respect.”

Escarcega said a bull bison from the group that could not be transported because it was uncooperative had to be killed. The meat was to be distributed to tribal members.

Yellowstone’s bison are highly prized for their pure genes. Yet thousands have been killed during their winter migrations under a government-sponsored program meant to protect livestock outside the park from the disease brucellosis, which many bison carry.

The bison for the tribes were culled from Yellowstone’s wild herds in 2005 and 2006 under an experimental program designed to start new populations elsewhere.

They are being shipped at night because they will be calmer and easier to move, said Tom Palmer with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The wildlife advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife is covering the shipping costs, Palmer said.

On the reservation, the bison will be kept in a 140-acre pen for a 10-day adjustment period, Fort Peck Fish and Game Director Robert Magnan said. Then they’ll be released onto a 13,000-acre pasture north of Poplar that already holds about 48 Yellowstone bison transferred to the tribes two years ago.

Earlier attempts to relocate the animals failed, in part because of opposition from livestock interests. They had been held since 2010 on CNN founder Ted Turner’s ranch near Bozeman. As compensation for caring for the animals, Turner gets to keep 75 percent of their offspring, or 179 bison.

Most of those offspring will be kept in Montana for the foreseeable future as part of a conservation herd, Turner Enterprises General Manager Mark Kossler said. Some of the bulls will be used for breeding to improve the genetics in other Turner-owned bison herds scattered over 15 ranches across the Western U.S., Kossler said.

“It’s worked out well for the bison,” Kossler said. “They’ve been preserved instead of going to slaughter, and they’re going to be used for conservation.”

The experimental program under which the original animals were captured as they attempted to migrate outside the park has since ended.

However, Yellowstone administrators have proposed reviving the program in hopes of establishing the park as a source of bison to start new herds across the U.S.

Closer to the park, wildlife officials on Wednesday released a proposal requested by Gov. Steve Bullock that would allow bison to roam year-round in some parts of Montana if the park population drops below 3,500 animals.

If adopted, it would break a longstanding impasse over where and when bison should be allowed to roam in areas of Montana bordering Yellowstone.

Bullock intervened after state livestock and wildlife officials could not agree on a solution.

At populations exceeding 3,500 animals, bison still would be subject to slaughter, increased hunting and hazing back into the park.

Yellowstone had about 4,900 bison at last count.