The News Centrals

U.S. Department of Education has ordered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University to remodel their joint Middle East studies program. The two universities inappropriately uses federal grants to advance "ideological priorities" promoting Islam and not highlighting "positive" imagery of Christianity and Judaism, according to the Trump administration, that is threatening to cut funding if they do not revise their joint Consortium for Middle Eastern Studies. The consortium received $235,000 from the grant last year, according to Education Department data. Assistant Secretary Robert King says the program lacks balance. It offers "few, if any, programs focused on the historic discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious minorities in the Middle East, including Christians , Jews, Baha'is, Yadizis, Kurds, Druze, and others," King writes. The letter, published in the Federal Register, ...

Top position, again. Princeton University took the No. 1 title as the top national university — for the ninth consecutive year — in an annual list compiled by U.S. News & World Report. The private New Jersey school wasn’t the only Ivy League institution to occupy a top slot on the list unveiled Monday — Harvard University came in second place. The Big Apple’s own Ivy, Columbia University, as well as Connecticut’s Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — which is not an Ivy but known for its selectivity — tied for third. Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. took the top spot among national liberal arts colleges for the 17th year in a row, followed by Amherst College, also in the Bay State. Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and Wellesley College in Massachusetts tied for third. The University of California—Los Angeles occupies the No. 1 spot as the top public university, followed by the University of California–Berkeley and the University of Michi...

A  new study  found extreme changes in the atmosphere killed almost 100% of life on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Researchers sampled barite, a mineral more than 2 billion years old, in subarctic Canada's Belcher Islands. Rocks that old "lock in chemical signatures," helpful clues for researchers to uncover what the atmosphere was like when the rocks first formed, co-lead author and Stanford University Ph.D. candidate Malcolm Hodgskiss told. T he Great Oxidation Event The study focused on a phenomenon called the " Great Oxidation Event ". It goes like this: Billions of years ago, only micro-organisms survived on Earth. When they photosynthesized, they altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere, creating a glut of oxygen they ultimately could not sustain. Micro-organisms exhausted the nutrients they needed to create oxygen, which knocked the Earth's atmosphere off-kilter. This led to an "enormous drop" in the biosphere --...