Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1902 as an organization for scientific discovery. His intention was for the institution to be home to exceptional individuals—men and women with imagination and extraordinary dedication capable of working at the cutting edge of their fields. more »
Co-director of the Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE), Toby Horn, will receive the 2009 Bruce Alberts Award for Excellence in Science Education from the American Society for Cell Biology at their December meeting.
Seismologist and geophysicist Paul Gordon Silver, at Terrestrial Magnetism, died in an automobile accident in North Carolina on August 7, 2009, as he was driving his daughter Celine back from a research internship in Florida. Celine perished in the crash as well. more »
The Australian government has announced that it will provide $88.4 million AUD ($72.4 million USD) to help fund the revolutionary 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) to be sited at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s high-altitude Atacama Desert. This brings the funding that has been raised to date to $200 million out of approximately $700 million total needed to complete construction, which is scheduled for 2019.
Find out about a mysterious space blob, how to get the left side of the brain right, an asteroid impact, and much more in the summer 2009 issue of CarnegieScience.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Carnegie Institution a $4 million grant over three years to initiate the Deep Carbon Observatory -- an international, decade-long project to investigate the nature of carbon in Earth's deep interior. more »
Biofuels such as ethanol offer an alternative to petroleum for powering our cars, but growing energy crops to produce them can compete with food crops for farmland, and clearing forests to expand farmland will aggravate the climate change problem. How can we maximize our “miles per acre” from biomass? Researchers writing in the online edition of the May 7 Science magazine say the best bet is to convert the biomass to electricity, rather than ethanol. They calculate that, compared to ethanol used for internal combustion engines, bioelectricity used for battery-powered vehicles would deliver an average of 80% more miles of transportation per acre of crops, while also providing double the greenhouse gas offsets to mitigate climate change. Audio Interview more »
On August 24, Moody’s Investors Service affirmed its highest rating—Aaa/VMIG1—on the Carnegie Institution’s Series 1993, 2002, and 2006 bonds. Only 37 other higher education institutions and not-for-profit organizations are currently rated in this category, the highest ranking awarded to this group.
Audio Press Release Surprisingly little is known about the interactions that proteins have with each other and the protective membrane that surrounds a cell. These membrane proteins regulate nutrients, sense environmental threats, and are the communications interface between and within cells. Now researchers at Plant Biology have cloned genes to produce membrane proteins that may initiate instructions for genes to turn on in the nucleus. They just donated 2010 of them to the ArabidopsisBiologicalResourceCenter. more »
Video Press Release Oil and gas started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and were heated under layers of sediments in the Earth’s crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could have been created deeper in the mantle and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, researchers have found that ethaneand heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under conditions of the upper mantle. more »
