The MacArthur Foundation recently funded one of the first multi-year efforts to analyze and evaluate youth behavior online.  The study, conducted as part of the Digital Youth Project, was exhaustive and included hundreds of structured interviews, over 5000 hours of observation, and analysis and review of over 10,000 MySpace and Facebook pages.[2]

In 2008 the National Science Foundation launched a new program to use CubeSats-- small, breadbox-sized satellites-- in space weather and atmospheric research.

Since 2004, Evergreen State College ecologist Nalini Nadkarni has used prisoners at Cedar Creek Corrections Center as assistants in a project "to identify the best ways to cultivate slow-growing mosses."

Harvard biology professor Peter Girguis and his team have created a low-cost power generator for families in Tanzania.

Writing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, R. Graham Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, and his colleagues describe how a laboratory technique, mass spectrometry, could find a wider application in crime investigations.

A venture fund known as S.E.VEN (Social Equity Venture Fund) recently announced a novel competition for ideas to address an important issue in emerging economies: namely how to rate possible investment opportunities in potentially higher risk emerging economies. Their idea is to create an index to rate possible investments with the aim of increasing the flow of investment in these regions. While the aim of the competition is noble itself, what's most unique is HOW they will run the competition.

Open Data and Science

The state's laboratory field services group issued 13 cease-and-desist letters to genetic testing companies. Wired.com obtained a copy of the letters (pdf.) from two recipients. And the tough talk in a recent teleconference among regulatory officials confirms the seriousness of the department's intent.

A recent letter to the Financial Times, signed by a number of prominent British and American scientists, decries the growth of "third-party assessments such as peer review" as inimical to radical scientific innovation. Leaving aside arguments about the degree to which "normal" versus "revolutionary" science differ, or can be prospectively identified and supported, the letter is another piece of evidence that a growing number of scientists see the traditional structures that regulated and rewarded their work: