Inside Other Bubbles: Headlines from the Ivory Tower

According to professors at Northern Illinois University, the world will not in fact end on Dec. 21, 2012, the last day of the Mayan Long Count calendar. As this date is a winter solstice, some have theorized that a planetary alignment will cause the Earth’s poles to be reversed; others propose the eruption of a supervolcano. However,  Professor of Planetary Science Paul Stoddard and Professor Emeritus of Geology Jonathan Berg say that neither event is likely.

University of Utah graduate and doctoral students launched the beta version of www.deeppeep.org. When fully operational, the search engine will allow users to get travel quotes from multiple websites after entering locations and dates just once, which is a service that few other sites provide. Additionally, the website will provide access to forms and databases unavailable through other search engines such as Google.

Researches at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute say that it may be possible to develop an effective human flu vaccine in the next three years. The vaccine would target a region of the influenza virus not prone to mutations (as most regions of the virus are), and is therefore present in most strains of the virus. The antibodies identified in this project might also be effective against Avian flu and the Spanish Flu.

A change in the University of Oregon admissions system will grant automatic admission to students with a grade point average of 3.4 or higher, an increase from the previous threshold of 3.25. As students with a GPA below 3.4 will need to submit short essays and other materials to gain admission, administrators hope that reducing the number of automatically admitted students (70% of the incoming class in 2008) will provide a greater chance of admission to students with a broader range of experience.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse recently reported that, between 2005 and 2008, 227 million records containing private information were involved in Internet or other security breaches. Some of these private records may have been used in the 8.1 million cases of identity theft in 2007 reported by the California Office of Privacy Protection.