Stakes High for ORNL with Funding Increase

We all received a dramatic e-mail from Thom Mason, ORNL Director.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/feb/27/stakes-high-for-lab-with-funding-increase/

My opinion: a stimulus cannot be simply 'putting money back in people's pockets'. It must seed the conditions for prosperity by getting people doing creative, useful, productive hard work who otherwise would be frozen out, discouraged or downgraded due to the sluggish market. Nothing accomplishes this better than good science.

Planting Seeds to Unlock Thorny Ethanol Enigma

...an ASCR press release on our "Big Iron" work.

http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/bigiron/smith1.shtml

American Science Takes The Lead..

...with the ORNL Jaguar Supercomputer and UT's Kraken.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v42_1_09/cover_story.shtml

At this moment we are using both Jaguar and Kraken heavily and they have transformed the length and timescales of some of our MD simulations. Analysing the results, however, will take quite a while...

UTK will award Honorary Doctorate to Dolly Parton

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/feb/17/ut-bestow-dolly-parton-honorary-doctorate-degree/

See also:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/sunday_times_university_guide/article478501.ece

From a Professor of Education at Edinburgh: "The criterion these days is often that the honorary graduate is well known rather than they have made a distinctive contribution in their particular academic field,” Smithers says. “Now that particular public relations genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be stuffed back in. And that is all right — providing nobody takes it too seriously"

Mathematicians Discover Largest Number

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/02/numbers-in-the-news.html


".....could lead to breakthroughs in fields as diverse as astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and Chicago asphalt contracting."

Massive Increase in Science Funding?

Now that's real stimulus.:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/05/economic-stimulus-package-will-boost-science-and-green-tech/

..but a proposed $1.4bn NSF funding increase, which would have been a highly cost-effective stimulus measure in both the short and longer terms, has been shelved:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/Collins-Nelson-Cuts/?resultpage=2&

..and the reason for the cut may have not been an assessment of the economic effects of bolstered creative research in the broad sciences, but rather a response to improper internet use by a few NSF employees:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090130/NEWS/90130001

Reasons to be Cheerful, Part II

Great new results from the Tennessee lab:

Xiaolin C. - has now solid DOE funding.
Jerome B - has recruited a great postdoc (Barbara)
Hong G. - was tenured.
Hao-Bo G. - is cranking out the neutron spin-echo protein simulation to very long times
Moumita S. - has discovered a cellulase reaction mechanism.
Jiancong X. - has characterised cellulosome cohesin-dockerin binding
Roland S. - scaled MD to 30,000 processors on the Jaguar supercomputer.
Krishnan - has understood methyl rotor responses to ligand binding.
Jerry P - has a Mer B mechanism in excellent agreement with experiment
Nikolai S - is beginnning to produce neutron plots
Barbara C - looks like she can screen 150 million ligands on Jaguar
Barmak M - got his badge
Benjamin L - has rejuvenated the SASSIM program and shown how cellulose diffracts