(Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News) How best to ensure environmental justice for Native-Americans in terms of policy, governance, and activism on tribal lands? The broad range of issues, challenges, and possibilities are explored in an insightful and thought-provoking special issue of Environmental Justice titled “Environmental Justice in Native America.”

(Northwestern University) Two related studies from Northwestern University offer new strategies for tackling the challenges of preventing and treating diseases of protein folding, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, ALS, cystic fibrosis, cancer and type 2 diabetes. The research identifies new genes and pathways that prevent protein misfolding and toxic aggregation, keeping cells healthy, and also identifies small molecules with therapeutic potential that restore health to damaged cells, providing new targets for drug development.

(Northwestern University) Two related studies from Northwestern University offer new strategies for tackling the challenges of preventing and treating diseases of protein folding, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, ALS, cystic fibrosis, cancer and type 2 diabetes. The research identifies new genes and pathways that prevent protein misfolding and toxic aggregation, keeping cells healthy, and also identifies small molecules with therapeutic potential that restore health to damaged cells, providing new targets for drug development.

(Northwestern University) Two related studies from Northwestern University offer new strategies for tackling the challenges of preventing and treating diseases of protein folding, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, ALS, cystic fibrosis, cancer and type 2 diabetes. The research identifies new genes and pathways that prevent protein misfolding and toxic aggregation, keeping cells healthy, and also identifies small molecules with therapeutic potential that restore health to damaged cells, providing new targets for drug development.

(US Pharmacopeia) As the pharmaceutical industry continues to globalize, the challenges of securing complex supply chains and protecting patients from counterfeit medicines, as well as the consequences of lapses in security or proper handling, have mounted. In an effort to encourage comprehensive public standards across the pharmaceutical industry, the US Pharmacopeial Convention is proposing a set of recommended best practices.

Posted by randfish

If you've been following my posts on Linkscape's index, you know that we've been trying to aim for fresher, better and larger indices over the past few months, but have been finding some very tough challenges. It turns out that indexing the web, canonicalizing millions of pages and calculating a link graph with quality metrics is super-hard; who knew?

As part of those efforts, we've been working toward an experimental index that leverages a more search-engine style crawler that crawls fresher pages/sites more often and less fresh stuff less frequently. That index, however, is taking its sweet time (and we're doing a lot of babysitting and monitoring to make sure it's smooth). Our tentative plan is to have that index launched in the next 2 weeks, but we felt that since our last index was at the very end of November, a new one with fresher data was warranted. Hence, last night, we launched an interim index with the following metrics:

• 36,660,519,013 (36 billion) URLs
• 427,626,242 (427 million) Subdomains
• 128,149,029 (128 million) Root Domains
• 387,656,119,262 (387 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.05% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 55.00% of nofollowed links are internal, 45.00% are external
• Rel Canonical – 10.57% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 69.12 links on it (negligible from last index)
  • 57.76 internal links on average
  • 11.36 external links on average

This index is smalller than our last few, but the numbers look reasonably solid and the data's from the first few weeks of December, so it should be helpful to all you link builders and analyzers. Do be aware, though, that this update is likely to only last a couple weeks before we replace it with our new version, for which we have high expectations (but don't want to promise the moon just yet).

Also noteworthy – last night, when the index first launched, we experienced some wackiness with Page and Domain Authority scores. Those should have largely settled down to normalcy now, but if you see anything odd, please let us know.

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(NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Center) Atlantic salmon face new challenges in the Gulf of Maine, where changing spring wind patterns, warming ocean temperatures and new predators along migration routes are affecting their survival. Maine is now the only state in the region with wild Atlantic salmon populations. While increasing numbers of smolts are entering the ocean via the Gulf of Maine, few are returning, raising questions as to where these fish are going and what is happening to them at sea.

(Nanyang Technological University) Nanyang Technological University has conferred an honorary doctorate to former Singapore President and NTU Chancellor, Mr. S.R. Nathan at a special ceremony this morning, in recognition of his distinguished achievements and contributions to the university and to Singapore. A seminar themed, “Security in the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges,” is held in his honor this afternoon, with Mr. Nathan delivering the keynote address.

(Michigan State University) A team of Michigan State University researchers secured a $700,000 grant to help farmers in Zambia and Kenya overcome the challenges faced from changes in climate. The project, which will link climate change to coping strategies and impacts on food production, food security and incomes for farm families in those areas, is funded by the US Agency for International Development Bureau for Food Security, Office of Agriculture, Research and Transformation.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) The increasing complexity of multi-invention technologies such as laptops and smartphones raises serious challenges for firms looking to cash in with the “next big thing,” and points to a need for businesses to integrate their patent and business strategies, according to research by business professor Deepak Somaya, a patent strategy expert.