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Evidence supporting the link between savings and college success is growing. Three studies out of the Center for Social Development (CSD) at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis offer a connection between assets and college enrollment and completion.

For the first time, more college students are using smart phones than traditional feature phones, reports a new study from Ball State University.

"Bicyclean, a pedal-powered grindstone that pulverizes entire circuit boards inside a polycarbonate enclosure, capturing the dust. Though Field is now a year out of college, her project recently won the silver award at the Acer Foundation's Incredible Green Contest in Taiwan and was displayed for three days at COMPUTEX Taipei, one of the world's largest computer industry expositions. The $35,000 prize will enable her to return to Ghana to test a second-generation prototype and to seek non-profit status for the endeavor, a significant milestone in a project she was afraid might fall by the wayside after graduation."

Examples of the damages caused by these so-called "invasive species" are seemingly as endless as the amount of battles waged against them. But are all non-native species bad? Biologist Mark Davis says no. Davis, a professor from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, believes it's time to raise the white flag against non-native species. Most non-native species, he said, are harmless -- or even helpful. In a letter published in the journal Nature this past June, Davis and 18 other ecologists argued that these destructive invasive species -- or those non-native species that cause ecological or economic harm -- are only a tiny subset of non-native species, and that this tiny fraction has basically given all new arrivals a bad name.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Union College (Schenectady, N.Y.) have found that people's death anxiety can influence them to support theories of intelligent design and reject evolutionary theory.

Imagine a cell phone battery that charges with every step you take or a spacesuit that uses astronauts' expended energy to run the suit's electronics. A team of college students conducting NASA research on this innovative use of nanotechnology took their research to new heights. The team, comprising Hannah Clevenson, Olivia Lenz and Tanya Miracle, flew an experiment related to their nanotechnology research on a NASA reduced-gravity flight.

High-performance nanotech materials arrayed on a flat panel platform demonstrated seven to eight times higher efficiency than previous solar thermoelectric generators, opening up solar-thermal electric power conversion to a broad range of residential and industrial uses, a team of researchers from Boston College and MIT report in the journal Nature Materials.

More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes soil to release the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, new research published in this week's edition of Nature reveals. "This feedback to our changing atmosphere means that nature is not as efficient in slowing global warming as we previously thought," said Dr Kees Jan van Groenigen, Research Fellow at the Botany department at the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, and lead author of the study.

According to a series of articles published in Nature, the world has too many PhDs and not enough academic jobs to sustain them. Researchers point out that it is either time to make changes in the system or eliminate it altogether.