Texas vulture study upends forensics

This article is from Seattle pi

For more than five weeks, a woman's body lay undisturbed in a secluded Texas field. Then a frenzied flock of vultures descended on the corpse and reduced it to a skeleton within hours.

But this was not a crime scene lost to nature. It was an important scientific experiment into the way human bodies decompose, and the findings are upending assumptions about decay that have been the basis of homicide cases for decades.

Experienced investigators would normally have interpreted the absence of flesh and the condition of the bones as evidence that the woman had been dead for six months, possibly even a year or more. Now a study of vultures at Texas State University is calling into question many of the benchmarks detectives have long relied on.

Pseudosciences are destroying the reputation of Australia's universities

This article is from physorg.com

The strongly-worded editorial by Alastair MacLennan, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Adelaide, and Robert Morrison of Flinders University, is the latest shot in the acrimonious exchange between proponents of traditional medicine and practitioners of complementary and alternative varieties.

Professor MacLennan and Dr. Morrison are both founding members of Friends of Science in Medicine, a collection of more than 460 people and organizations who say they are dedicated to fighting the growth of pseudoscience in medicine. In January the group wrote a letter to every vice-chancellor in Australia asking for a review of their health science courses to “ensure that primacy is given to scientific principles based on experimental evidence”.

University City Science Center Port Business Incubator Receives International Incubator Designation

This article is by Market Watch The Wall Street Journal

The National Business Incubation Association has awarded the NBIA Soft Landings International Incubator designation to the University City Science Center in Philadelphia.

The NBIA's Soft Landings Program recognizes incubators that are especially capable of helping nondomestic companies enter the incubator's domestic market. The University City Science Center was selected for the program because of its slate of business services for nondomestic firms and its demonstrated success at helping firms enter the U.S. market, said Tim King, NBIA international programs operations manager.

Proposed reconfiguring of N.J. universities to be discussed by state Senate committee

This article is from the New Jersey Real-Time News  

New Jersey lawmakers are trying to join the conversation about whether to reconfigure some state universities.

The state Senate's Higher Education Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing today about a plan endorsed by Gov. Chris Christie that would fold Rutgers University's Camden campus into Rowan University.

Rutgers' main campus in New Brunswick and Piscataway would absorb three units of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The remaining parts of the medical university would be renamed the New Jersey Health Sciences University.

There's been protest from Rutgers-Camden officials, students, faculty and alumni who object to a name change for their campus.

Christie has not laid out a process for making the changes.