February 19, 2009
Peer portfolio: Activities at UW’s peer institutions
GM + U-M = ABCD: General Motors and the University of Michigan have teamed up to help speed up the design of advanced batteries for electric cars. A five-year, $5 million-dollar GM award to the university will establish the GM/U-M Advanced Battery Coalition for Drivetrains, or the ABCD for short. The campus newspaper, The Record, reported that the coalition “will accelerate the development of advanced batteries by conducting cutting-edge experiments and simulations to better understand and resolve issues related to battery life and performance.”
MEDIEVAL AND ONLINE: Frustrated with the difficulty of finding digitized copies of Medieval manuscripts online, a group of researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles has created the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. The site links to every manuscript from the eighth to the 15th century that has been fully digitized “by any library, archive, institute or private owner anywhere in the world,” according to the UCLA Web site. Find it at http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/. In its first three weeks of operation, the site had almost 5,000 visitors from Australia, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and all over the United States.
HONEY BEE HAVEN: The University of California, Davis, has received a grant from Haagan-Dazs to create a one-half acre garden on campus with plants to provide food for honey bees. The grant will pay for a nationwide design competition, and then creation of the garden itself. “The Honey Bee Haven will be a pollinator paradise,” said the university’s chair of entomology — who clearly has an ear for a buzzworthy sound bite.
‘CENTIPEDE CINEMA.’ That’s the title of this year’s Insect Film Festival on Feb. 28 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, according to the university’s Web site, “even though everybody — with the possible exception of horror movie writers, directors and actors — knows that centipedes aren’t insects.” May Berenbaum, professor of entomology who founded the festival in 1984, said, “We can still call it an Insect Fear Film Festival because generally the people who are in movies with centipedes or millipedes call them insects.”
