December 4, 2008
Peer Portfolio
SCHOOL AFTER WAR: The University of Missouri is opening the new MU Veterans Center, designed to be “one-stop shopping” for war veterans returning to school. “Veterans have experiences that are different from many other students at our university,” the center’s interim director told the university’s newspaper, Mizzou Weekly. “Many of them have not been in school for seven or eight years, and so years later when they are thrown into a four-year university it can be extremely stressful. We will do anything we can to help veterans adjust to the change.”
SQUIRREL CONTROL: The University of California, Davis, is starting a research program with the dual aim of reducing the number of non-native tree squirrels on its campus and testing a new birth control drug that wildlife biologists hope manage other pests in other places. The squirrels will be caught, marked with a nontoxic dye and set free. Then in summer some will be recaptured, given hormone injections to stop them reproducing, freed again and tracked. If all goes well, Dateline reported, the tree squirrel population will plateau and then decline to a sustainable number in five or 10 years, “with no harm to the animals.”
PAYBACK PREDICTED: The University of Wisconsin now has a Web site where potential students — “future Badgers,” that is — can calculate how much better off financially they will be with a college degree. According to the campus newspaper, Wisconsin Week, “the site gives tailor-made, personalized answers that may vary by the user’s characteristics.” The site seeks to estimate the cost of a UW-Madison degree, the amount of financial aid a student might receive and his or her expected lifetime earnings with, and without, such a degree. The site is at http://payback.wisc.edu.
THE GLOW SHOWS: Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a simple and quick method for detecting mercury in fish and dental samples, two substances at the center of public concern about mercury contamination, according to the university’s Web site. The technique involves a fluorescent substance that glows bright green when it comes into contact with oxidized mercury, the researchers report in the current online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The intensity of the glow indicates the amount of mercury present.
RECORDING NATURE: Jeff Rice, a research librarian at the University of Utah, is trying to create the first comprehensive archive of natural sounds in the West. And the archive will be free. Just a year after starting, Rice already has more than 800 recordings, and his goal is to catalog the nearly 1,200 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians found across 11 Western states. He also hopes to record “ambient landscapes” from various wilderness locations. The World Conservation Union says one in three amphibian species are at risk for extinction, and Associated Press article about Rice says. “It’s very much a race against time,” he said.
Peer Portfolio is an occasional column chronicling news from the UW’s peer institutions.
