SCIENCE & EDUCATION

The UK government last week announced an emergency 10,000 extra places at universities this autumn to ease the mounting pressure on the university admissions system - but refused to fully fund the expansion, writes Polly Curtis for The Guardian. The extra students will receive their grants and loans and pay tuition fees, but the universities will get no extra money directly from the government to cover teaching costs.

More young students from poor backgrounds in Britain are going to university than ever before, narrowing the gap between rich and poor students' participation rates, new government figures suggest, writes Anthea Lipsett for The Guardian. Statistics on full-time young participation by socio-economic class released last week showed that the proportion of England's 18- to 20-year-olds from the top three socio-economic classes taking degrees fell to 41.2% in 2007-08, from 45.2% in 2002-03. Over the same period, going to university full-time became more common among the bottom four socio-economic groups, with participation rates increasing from 18.1% to 21%.

Tibetan monks and nuns spend their lives studying the inner world of the mind rather than the physical world of matter. Yet for one month this spring a group of 91 monastics devoted themselves to the corporeal realm of science, reports The New York Times. Instead of delving into Buddhist texts on karma and emptiness, they learned about Galileo's law of accelerated motion, chromosomes, neurons and the Big Bang, among other far-ranging topics.

Japan: A key government panel on education suggested the establishment of a new category of school that will attach primary importance to practical vocational training for high school graduates. The idea was suggested by the Central Council for Education as a measure to broaden the range of career choices for high school graduates and reduce the high rate of young people leaving employment. The move reflects public concern over the increasing number of part-time job hoppers and NEETs, a term that refers to young people not in education, employment or training. On Monday, a special committee of the panel to the education, science and technology minister compiled the draft of a report on the vocational independence of young people. The report states that the new schools will create a new category of educational body in addition to universities and vocational colleges

Colleges under the umbrella of Delhi University (DU) is going to be hi-tech. Library of Sri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) is going to be fully air-conditioned. To keep a track on the books, a radio frequency identification system (RFID) will also be installed. With the installation of RFID, manual system of issue and deposit of books will be replaced. SGTB Khalsa College is also planning to make its library web based."Our college library is well stocked with 1,33,000 books some even dating back to 1919," said Jaswinder Singh Principal SGTB. The library at Kirori Mal College (KMC) has around 1.2 lakh books. It has CCTV cameras installed at strategic locations above the book shelves.

'New model', 'high-quality' and 'quick access to international standard' were phrases used by Tran Thi Ha, Director of the University Education Department in the Ministry of Education and Training, when talking about plans to build four world-class universities, reports VietNamNet Bridge. Ha said one of the four universities of international standard will be the Vietnam-Germany University, which has been operating in HCM City with Germany being the main partner. The second university will be the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, whose strategic partner will be the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology.

Last week, the government created the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which will have responsibility for higher and further education policy. Nobody would disagree that our universities and colleges are as much about the cultural bedrock of our society as the competitiveness of the economy. So why bring them into a department whose core remit is Britain's economic development? asks Peter Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, in The Guardian. The simple answer is that the mission of the new department is to build Britain's resources of skill, knowledge and creativity. These things drive our competitiveness directly, but also indirectly by reinforcing our cultural awareness, confidence and sense of our past and future.

Despite a 200-year tradition, Serbia is facing challenges in its higher education sector - chiefly the adoption of European standards and accession to a common European education system - writes Bojana Milovanovic for the Southeast European Times. In 2003 Serbia signed the Bologna Declaration, a key document endorsed by 46 countries. The agreement envisions establishing a single university space and introducing equal standards for instruction and grading in European countries. This will allow disparate degrees to be valued on equal footing in the European labour market.

The Government proposes the establishment of 3 800 new student places at universities and university colleges as of fall 2009. In addition, the Government also increases the funding for the higher education institutions with 80 million kroner. The measures are part of the Revised National Budget. Increased capacity in higher education is a central priority for the Ministry of Research and Higher Education. In addition to more places in higher education, the Government proposes to increase grants to post-secondary vocational education by 20 million kroner, which gives room for 400-450 new places.

An American study has found that students who spend their time adding friends, chatting and 'poking' others on the website may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work, writes Urmee Khan in The Telegraph. The study by Ohio State University showed that students who used Facebook had a "significantly" lower grade point average than those who did not.

Seven of the worlds' top technological universities Tuesday gathered here to create an alliance to enhance academic exchanges and make better use of technologies to meet global challenges. The alliance, named the Global Alliance of Technological Universities, groups top universities including California institute of Technology and Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, Imperial College London and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in Europe, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Nanyang Technological University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Asia.

For as long as anyone can remember, introductory physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was taught in a vast windowless amphitheatre known by its number, 26-100, writes Jodi Hilton for the New York Times. Squeezed into the rows of hard, folding wooden seats, as many as 300 freshmen anxiously took notes while the professor covered multiple blackboards with mathematical formulas and explained the principles of Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism. But now, with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, MIT has made a striking change.

The government has announced a list of universities whose research projects will be funded to support their international competitiveness, reports Korea Times. Eighteen universities will benefit from the World Class University project that will finance 52 research initiatives proposed by the institutions, said the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.

Poor funding and lack of quality and quantity of teachers have affected the enrolment of students in higher education in India, a recent report has said. The Ernst & Young-EDGE 2008 report on Globalising Higher Education in India found low levels of funding of higher education in India compared with other developing nations such as China, Brazil and Russia, reports Zee News.

New Delhi: The Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) has been ranked as the best business school in India, and among the list of 27 global business schools identified by Eduniversal, a unit of the French consulting firm SMBG.

International postgraduate research student numbers in Australia have increased more rapidly than those in other programmes, suggesting the country is finding traction in the global talent wars, new research has shown.

A state-wide organisation that studies Florida's higher education system issued a sombre report last week calling for reform in universities it says are too big, have crowded classrooms, are academically below schools nationwide, and are losing top researchers as budget cuts continue to threaten programmes, reports the Palm Beach Post. The report from Enlace Florida is its second this year critical of the state's 11 public universities.

A radical new approach to teaching music that gets pupils to "jam" like rock stars has led to a sharp rise in the number of children wanting to take GCSE music. Rock-style music lessons boosted the popularity of GCSE music by 40 per cent, as well as improving pupils' behaviour and concentration in lessons, an evaluation by academics from London University's Institute of Education concluded

Macquarie University has joined the small club of Australian institutions that require academics to make their research papers freely available over the Internet. Under a new policy, academics must send a copy of journal articles to Macquarie's open access repository.

School is putting many parents under pressure, two charities are warning. A YouGov poll of 2,128 adults for Barnardo's and Citizens Advice found 73% of parents said the expense of uniforms was a source of stress. Government guidelines issued to schools in England say school uniforms must be reasonably priced and widely available. But Citizen's Advice said many schools were ignoring the advice, aimed at helping parents on low incomes.