Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.
“If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school,” says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.
“Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,” Cristóbal says. “It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.”
After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. “When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education,” says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.
Holy shit. This is fucking awesome.
Vesta Likely Cold and Dark Enough for Ice
Though generally thought to be quite dry, roughly half of the giant asteroid Vesta is expected to be so cold and to receive so little sunlight that water ice could have survived there for billions of years, according to the first published models of Vesta’s average global temperatures and illumination by the sun.
“Near the north and south poles, the conditions appear to be favorable for water ice to exist beneath the surface,” says Timothy Stubbs of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Stubbs and Yongli Wang of the Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute at the University of Maryland published the models in the January 2012 issue of the journal Icarus. The models are based on information from telescopes including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Vesta, the second-most massive object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, probably does not have any significant permanently shadowed craters where water ice could stay frozen on the surface all the time, not even in the roughly 300-mile-diameter (480-kilometer-diameter) crater near the south pole, the authors note. The asteroid isn’t a good candidate for permanent shadowing because it is tilted on its axis at about 27 degrees, which is even greater than Earth’s tilt of roughly 23 degrees. In contrast, the moon, which does have permanently shadowed craters, is tilted at only about 1.5 degrees. As a result of its large tilt, Vesta has seasons, and every part of the surface is expected to see the sun at some point during Vesta’s year.
The presence or absence of water ice on Vesta tells scientists something about the tiny world’s formation and evolution, its history of bombardment by comets and other objects, and its interaction with the space environment. Because similar processes are common to many other planetary bodies, including the moon, Mercury and other asteroids, learning more about these processes has fundamental implications for our understanding of the solar system as a whole. This kind of water ice is also potentially valuable as a resource for further exploration of the solar system.
Many post NYC posts to come, promise.
![newsweek:
stfusexists:
kelsium:
indierawk:
Via BuzzFeed. #truth
Dudes, Ithaca and Ann Arbor have all of those things and actually affordable rent.
Yeah, but Portland and Brooklyn also have “near cooler places”, like the entire east coast and Seattle. Ithaca is sadly lacking on that front.
We would also like to add “jobs” under the Brooklyn category. No offense to Portland, but, y’know, that whole “where hipsters go to retire” thing has gotta be half-true, right? *ducks*
Yep, looks accurate. [via The Frisky]
Uh, Brooklyn trumps Portland no matter how cheap the rent is there because there are actually PEOPLE OF COLOR HERE. (says someone who lived in PDX for over five years during the crucial era of ‘99-‘04). PORTLAND IS, sez the 2010 census, the whitest city in America
what jawnita said.](http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lydcjdHVKz1qzryoao1_500.jpg)
Via BuzzFeed. #truth
Dudes, Ithaca and Ann Arbor have all of those things and actually affordable rent.
Yeah, but Portland and Brooklyn also have “near cooler places”, like the entire east coast and Seattle. Ithaca is sadly lacking on that front.
We would also like to add “jobs” under the Brooklyn category. No offense to Portland, but, y’know, that whole “where hipsters go to retire” thing has gotta be half-true, right? *ducks*
Yep, looks accurate. [via The Frisky]
Uh, Brooklyn trumps Portland no matter how cheap the rent is there because there are actually PEOPLE OF COLOR HERE. (says someone who lived in PDX for over five years during the crucial era of ‘99-‘04). PORTLAND IS, sez the 2010 census, the whitest city in America
what jawnita said.
NYC-bound.
Tiny capsules engineered to mimic part of the body’s immune system could strengthen its response to vaccines, say researchers.
The nanoparticles, described in the journal Nature Materials, are a message sent from cells in the skin to warn of a threat.
Scientists from Duke University in the US said mice given them as part of a vaccine coped with otherwise lethal infections.
They could soon be suitable for humans.
Vaccination involves priming the immune system to recognise particular bacteria or viruses, so that it is ready to counter-attack quickly in the event of a genuine infection.
As well as a deactivated or weakened version of the bacteria or virus in question, many vaccines contain “adjuvants” - extra ingredients designed to enhance this priming process.
The Duke University team aimed to hijack a natural immune response involving cells called mast cells found in the skin.
These cells are a key part of the driving force behind the itching and swelling during an allergic reaction, but are also thought to play a role in the “innate immune system” which reacts to infection.
It is believed that when they encounter certain bacteria and viruses, they release small capsules called “granules”, which contain a body chemical called tumour necrosis factor (TNF).
Nanoparticles (green) pictured in the lymph node (red) just half an hour after injection
This is the future!
