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Tonegawa Steps Down as Director - Susumu Tonegawa, Nobel Laureate and director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, has stepped down as director following a months-long uproar over his refusal to accept a young, female rising neuroscience star, Alla Karpova, as a colleague for competitive reasons. Eleven MIT professors wrote a letter of complaint to the university president accusing Professor Susumu Tonegawa of intimidating Alla Karpova, saying that "he would not mentor, interact, or collaborate with her if she took the job and that members of his research group would not work with her." Karpova declined the MIT offer and is now at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Crescent City, California Hit by Kuril Quake Tsunami - According to geologists, Crescent City harbor happens to lie in an area where waves from the Pacific are focused and amplified to create larger waves. While ocean waves generated by the magnitude 8.1 Kuril Islands earthquake last week didn't reach to more than 23 inches in the western Pacific, the tsunami sent by the quake caused extensive damage, destroying docks and tearing boats from their tethers in Crescent City, where waves crested to 6 feet moving at 30 miles an hour. The tsunami arrived 6 hours after the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska cancelled the tsunami warning for the U.S. Pacific coast.

Robot Teaches Itself to Walk and Respond to Injury - Cornell researchers have developed a four-legged robot that learns how to control itself in a new environment and adapt to changes. "The machine does not have a single model of itself -- it has many, simultaneous, competing, different, candidate models. The models compete over which can best explain the past experiences of the robot."

Submitted by elementlist on Nov 19, 2006

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