10,000 walrus come ashore in northwest Alaska

This Sept. 27, 2013 image provided by NOAA Fisheries shows thousands of walruses hauling out on a remote barrier island in the Chukchi Sea near Point Lay, Alaska.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An estimated 10,000 walrus unable to find sea ice over shallow Arctic Ocean water have come ashore on Alaska's northwest coast.

Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Friday photographed walrus packed onto a beach on a barrier island near Point Lay, an Inupiat Eskimo village 300 miles southwest of Barrow and 700 miles northwest of Anchorage.

The walrus have been coming to shore since mid-September. The large herd was spotted during NOAA's annual arctic marine mammal aerial survey, an effort conducted with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the agency that conducts offshore lease sales.

An estimated 2,000 to 4,000 walrus were photographed at the site Sept. 12. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that manages walrus, immediately took steps to prevent a stampede among the animals packed shoulder to shoulder on the rocky coastline. The agency works with villages to keep people and airplanes a safe distance from herds.

Young animals are especially vulnerable to stampedes triggered by a polar bear, a human hunter or a low-flying airplane. The carcasses of more than 130 mostly young walruses were counted after a stampede in September 2009 at Alaska's Icy Cape.

The gathering of walrus on shore is a phenomenon that has accompanied the loss of summer sea ice as the climate has warmed.

Pacific walrus spend winters in the Bering Sea. Females give birth on sea ice and use ice as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf.

As temperatures warm in summer, the edge of the sea ice recedes north. Females and their young ride the edge of the sea ice into the Chukchi Sea. However, in recent years, sea ice has receded north beyond continental shelf waters and into Arctic Ocean water 10,000 feet deep or more where walrus cannot dive to the bottom.

Walrus in large numbers were first spotted on the U.S. side of the Chukchi Sea in 2007. They returned in 2009, and in 2011, scientists estimated 30,000 walruses along one kilometer of beach near Point Lay.

Remnant ice kept walrus offshore in 2008 and again last year.

The goal of the marine mammals survey is to record the abundance of bowhead, gray, minke, fin and beluga whales plus other marine mammals in areas of potential oil and natural gas development, said NOAA Fisheries marine mammal scientist Megan Ferguson in an announcement.

"In addition to photographing the walrus haulout area, NOAA scientists documented more bowhead whales, including calves and feeding adults in the Beaufort Sea this summer compared to 2012," said Ferguson. "We are also seeing more gray whale calves in the Chukchi Sea than we have in recent years."

Environmental groups say the loss of sea ice due to climate warming is harming marine mammals and oil and gas development would add to their stress.


ORIGINAL: Yahoo

The World's Top Universities 2013

1. California Institute of Technology United States:2012 ranking: 1

2. Harvard (tie) United States: 2012 ranking: 4

2. University of Oxford (tie) United Kingdom: 2012 ranking: 2 (tie)

4. Stanford United States: 2012 ranking: 2 (tie)

5. Masachussetts Institute of Technology United States: 2012 ranking: 5

6. Princeton University United States: 2012 ranking: 6

7. University of Cambridge England: 2012 ranking: 7

8. University of California, Berkeley United States: 2012 ranking: 9

9. University of Chicago United States:2012 ranking: 10

10. Imperial College, London United Kingdom: 2012 ranking:8

The California Institute of Technology, a private institution with just 2,200 students, takes the number one slot again this year in the tenth annual World University Rankings, put out by Times Higher Education (THE), a London magazine that tracks the higher ed market. Two years ago Cal Tech bumped Harvard out of first place. Last year Harvard slipped down three slots, to No. 4, behind the University of Oxford in the U.K. and Stanford, which tied for second place. But this year Harvard is back in the No. 2 slot, tied with Oxford. Stanford slipped to fourth place in THE’s list of 400 schools.

Unlike Forbes’ own ranking, which measures only U.S. schools, or the much-read U.S. News & World Report’s lists of U.S. and international institutions, THE does not consider measures like

• entry requirements, 
• graduation rates, 
• professor ratings by students, or 
• alumni salaries post-graduation. 

Instead its methodology emphasizes global scholarship and reputation. “We put the heaviest weight on research and innovation, research productivity and research excellence,” explains THE rankings editor Phil Baty. “Our list is really about producing new ideas, about innovating, about attracting skills and talented people into a country,” he adds. “It’s also about bringing business money into the higher education center.”

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There is one other international university ranking, the ten-year-old Academic Ranking of World Universities, put out by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. It focuses on science and nature citations and awards, especially Nobel prizes, and it counts the number of articles published by faculty members in journals about nature and science. ARWU’s top three schools: Harvard, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. Cal Tech rates sixth and Oxford, tenth.

We think THE’s rankings are worth a story in part because universities and governments are taking them seriously. This week THE is hosting its first-ever World Academic Summit in Singapore. The conference is bringing together 200 senior university staffers from 31 countries. In addition, Baty says that the Japanese government has been tapping the rankings to plan the prime minister’s growth strategy and the Russian and Indian governments have invited THE staffers to talk about how those countries can make their universities more competitive. While Japan has five schools on THE’s top-200 list, Russia and India have none.

To compile its ranking, THE looked at 13 different “performance indicators” to evaluate whether schools are achieving their core missions of teaching, research, knowledge transfer and “international outlook.”

Thirty percent of the ranking score comes from citations of a university’s scholarship. Thomson Reuters, which did the data crunching for THE, combed through more than 6 million journal articles published over a six-year period and then calculated how many times those articles were cited by other scholars. Another 30% of the score comes from the volume of institutions’ research, and the reputation and income it generates. While THE also looks at teaching to derive 30% of a school’s score, it does not query students. Rather it examines measures like staff -to-student ratios and what percent of the faculty have PhDs. THE also tallied survey results from 10,500 academics around the world, who answered questions about the best departments in their disciplines, specialists in their fields, and where they would recommend their graduates go for further study. To put together its metrics, THE measured the experiences of all university students, not just undergrads. (To read more details about the methodology, click here).

Cal Tech landed at No. 1 because it scored well across the board. Its small faculty of 300 professors and 600 “research scholars” has won 31 Nobel prizes. Baty also points to the fact that Cal Tech manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the federally funded NASA research and development center that has been in the news for its Mars Rover robotic space mission. While this doesn’t affect the rankings, Cal Tech has gotten some attention as a home to nerds with a sense of humor because the hit sitcom “Big Bang Theory” is set there.

As for Stanford’s slip in the rankings, Baty says there are marginal differences between the schools at the top of the list. “There’s only a tiny fraction of a single point separating the very top universities,” he notes. Stanford’s research productivity and research reputation scores edged down slightly, which tipped the balance this year.

One piece of news: Baty says that U.S. schools have regained their footing and are dominating this year’s ranking with little sign of decline. Of the top 200 schools on the list, 77 are in the U.S. Last year Baty cautioned that Asian schools, which were getting substantial support from their governments, looked like they might impinge on the dominance of the U.S., because of shrinking funds, especially for major public research universities. Last year U.S. schools dropped on average six places each. Now Baty says that U.S. universities have stopped their slide, in part by increasing the enrollment of international students who can pay full tuition. Example: U.C.L.A. (No. 12 on THE’s list) admitted 2,544 international students in 2013, up from 672 in 2009. (It also admitted far more out-of-state American students, 4,094 in 2013, compared to 1,545 four years ago.) Non-Californians pay $22,900 more in annual tuition than in-staters.

Three U.S. schools are new to the top-200 list this year: Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, FLA, Northeastern University in Boston and Brandeis in Waltham, MA.

Baty emphasizes that THE’s list gives the highest marks to schools that reflect the notion that, as he puts it, “the best teaching is done by those who are absolutely at the forefront of their fields.” The idea is that students will be inspired by superstar researchers. “One moment the professor may be curing cancer and the next moment he is in the classroom inspiring students,” he says.

But does the best, most engaging teaching come from top scholars? That might be true for graduate-level courses. But if a professor really is working on a cure for cancer, he or she might prefer to be in the lab rather than a lecture hall filled with undergraduates. Professors with the greatest passion for teaching devote themselves to just that—teaching—as opposed to research. Because of its emphasis on scholarship , by design THE’s list includes no colleges, missing out on many of the best schools in the U.S., like Pomona, No. 2 on the Forbes list, or Swarthmore, Forbes’ No. 8.

That said, THE provides a valuable list of the world’s universities that are producing the best, most innovative and widely respected scholarship. For a complete list of the 400 schools rated by THE, click here.

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The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2013-2014 powered by Thomson Reuters are the only global university performance tables to judge world class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. The top universities rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

World University Rankings 2013-2014

Rank	Institution	Location	Overall score change criteria
1	California Institute of Technology	United States	94.9
2	Harvard University	United States	93.9
2	University of Oxford	United Kingdom	93.9
4	Stanford University	United States	93.8
5	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States	93.0
6	Princeton University	United States	92.7
7	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom	92.3
8	University of California, Berkeley	United States	89.8
9	University of Chicago	United States	87.8
10	Imperial College London	United Kingdom	87.5
11	Yale University	United States	87.4
12	University of California, Los Angeles	United States	86.3
13	Columbia University	United States	85.2
14	ETH Zürich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich	Switzerland	84.5
15	Johns Hopkins University	United States	83.7
16	University of Pennsylvania	United States	81.0
17	Duke University	United States	79.3
18	University of Michigan	United States	79.2
19	Cornell University	United States	79.1
20	University of Toronto	Canada	78.3
21	University College London	United Kingdom	77.6
22	Northwestern University	United States	77.1
23	The University of Tokyo	Japan	76.4
24	Carnegie Mellon University	United States	76.0
25	University of Washington	United States	73.4
26	National University of Singapore	Singapore	72.4
27	University of Texas at Austin	United States	72.2
28	Georgia Institute of Technology	United States	71.6
29	University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign	United States	71.4
30	University of Wisconsin-Madison	United States	71.1
31	University of British Columbia	Canada	70.8
32	London School of Economics and Political Science	United Kingdom	69.8
33	University of California, Santa Barbara	United States	68.4
34	University of Melbourne	Australia	68.2
35	McGill University	Canada	68.1
36	Karolinska Institute	Sweden	67.8
37	École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne	Switzerland	67.7
38	King's College London	United Kingdom	67.6
39	University of Edinburgh	United Kingdom	67.5
40	New York University	United States	67.4
40	University of California, San Diego	United States	67.4
42	Washington University in St Louis	United States	67.2
43	The University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong	65.3
44	Seoul National University	Republic of Korea	65.2
45	Peking University	China	65.0
46	University of Minnesota	United States	64.9
47	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	United States	64.5
48	Australian National University	Australia	64.4
49	Pennsylvania State University	United States	64.2
50	Tsinghua University	China	63.5
50	Boston University	United States	63.5
52	Kyoto University	Japan	63.2
52	Brown University	United States	63.2
52	University of California, Davis	United States	63.2
55	Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München	Germany	63.1
56	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology	Republic of Korea	62.9
57	Hong Kong University of Science and Technology	Hong Kong	62.5
58	University of Manchester	United Kingdom	62.3
59	Ohio State University	United States	62.0
60	Pohang University of Science and Technology	Republic of Korea	61.7
61	KU Leuven	Belgium	61.3
62	Purdue University	United States	60.7
63	Georg-August-Universität Göttingen	Germany	59.9
63	University of Queensland Australia	Australia	59.9
65	Rice University	United States	59.8
65	École Normale Supérieure	France	59.8
67	Leiden University	Netherlands	59.4
68	Universität Heidelberg	Germany	59.2
69	Delft University of Technology	Netherlands	59.1
70	University of Southern California	United States	59.0
70	École Polytechnique	France	59.0
72	University of Sydney	Australia	58.8
73	Erasmus University Rotterdam	Netherlands	58.1
74	Universität Basel	Switzerland	57.7
74	Utrecht University	Netherlands	57.7
76	Nanyang Technological University	Singapore	57.2
77	Wageningen University and Research Center	Netherlands	56.8
78	University of Pittsburgh	United States	56.7
79	University of Bristol	United Kingdom	56.3
80	Emory University	United States	56.1
80	Durham University	United Kingdom	56.1
80	Tufts University	United States	56.1
83	University of Amsterdam	Netherlands	55.9
83	Michigan State University	United States	55.9
85	Ghent University	Belgium	55.5
86	Freie Universität Berlin	Germany	55.3
87	Technische Universität München	Germany	55.2
88	Case Western Reserve University	United States	55.0
88	Vanderbilt University	United States	55.0
90	University of Notre Dame	United States	54.7
91	Monash University	Australia	54.6
92	McMaster University	Canada	54.5
93	University of California, Irvine	United States	54.1
94	Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin	Germany	53.8
95	University of Rochester	United States	53.6
96	Université Pierre et Marie Curie	France	53.5
97	University of Colorado Boulder	United States	53.4
98	University of Groningen	Netherlands	52.9
98	Maastricht University	Netherlands	52.9
100	University of Helsinki	Finland	52.6
100	University of York	United Kingdom	52.6
102	Royal Holloway, University of London	United Kingdom	52.5
103	Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey	United States	52.4
103	Stockholm University	Sweden	52.4
103	University of Arizona	United States	52.4
106	University of Montreal	Canada	52.3
106	Eindhoven University of Technology	Netherlands	52.3
108	University of Maryland, College Park	United States	52.2
109	Chinese University of Hong Kong	Hong Kong	52.0
109	University of Alberta	Canada	52.0
111	Uppsala University	Sweden	51.9
112	University of Virginia	United States	51.8
112	University of Sheffield	United Kingdom	51.8
114	University of New South Wales	Australia	51.7
114	Université Paris-Sud	France	51.7
114	Queen Mary, University of London	United Kingdom	51.7
117	KTH Royal Institute of Technology	Sweden	51.6
117	University of St Andrews	United Kingdom	51.6
117	Technical University of Denmark	Denmark	51.6
117	University of Glasgow	United Kingdom	51.6
121	University of Sussex	United Kingdom	51.2
121	University of Zürich	Switzerland	51.2
123	Lund University	Sweden	51.1
124	University of Geneva	Switzerland	51.0
125	Tokyo Institute of Technology	Japan	50.8
126	Dartmouth College	United States	50.5
126	University of Cape Town	South Africa	50.5
128	University of Florida	United States	50.4
129	RWTH Aachen University	Germany	50.3
129	Trinity College Dublin	Republic of Ireland	50.3
131	Radboud University Nijmegen	Netherlands	50.2
132	Université de Lausanne	Switzerland	50.1
132	Indiana University	United States	50.1
132	University of Massachusetts	United States	50.1
135	Boston College	United States	50.0
136	University of California, Santa Cruz	United States	49.9
137	Lancaster University	United Kingdom	49.7
138	Aarhus University	Denmark	49.6
139	University of Leeds	United Kingdom	49.5
139	Colorado School of Mines	United States	49.5
141	University of Warwick	United Kingdom	49.4
142	National Taiwan University	Taiwan	49.2
143	University of Utah	United States	49.1
144	Osaka University	Japan	49.0
144	VU University Amsterdam	Netherlands	49.0
146	University of Southampton	United Kingdom	48.9
146	Arizona State University	United States	48.9
148	University of Exeter	United Kingdom	48.7
148	University of California, Riverside	United States	48.7
150	Tohoku University	Japan	48.5
150	University of Copenhagen	Denmark	48.5
152	Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg	Germany	48.4
153	University of Birmingham	United Kingdom	48.3
154	Karlsruhe Institute of Technology	Germany	48.0
155	Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble	France	47.8
156	École Normale Supérieure de Lyon	France	47.5
157	University of Bern	Switzerland	47.4
157	University of Nottingham	United Kingdom	47.4
159	Texas A&M University	United States	47.2
160	Georgetown University	United States	47.0
161	University of Iowa	United States	46.7
161	University College Dublin	Republic of Ireland	46.7
161	University of Leicester	United Kingdom	46.7
164	University of Antwerp	Belgium	46.6
164	Pompeu Fabra University	Spain	46.6
164	Brandeis University	United States	46.6
164	University of Auckland	New Zealand	46.6
168	University of Western Australia	Australia	46.4
169	University of Liverpool	United Kingdom	46.3
170	University of Twente	Netherlands	46.2
170	University of Vienna	Austria	46.2
172	Yeshiva University	United States	46.1
172	Université Catholique de Louvain	Belgium	46.1
174	University of Delaware	United States	46.0
174	University of East Anglia	United Kingdom	46.0
176	University at Buffalo	United States	45.9
176	Université Libre de Bruxelles	Belgium	45.9
178	Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7	France	45.8
178	Stony Brook University	United States	45.8
180	Wake Forest University	United States	45.7
181	Universität Bonn	Germany	45.6
181	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute	United States	45.6
183	Iowa State University	United States	45.5
184	Northeastern University	United States	45.4
185	University of Oslo	Norway	45.3
185	University of Miami	United States	45.3
185	University of Ottawa	Canada	45.3
188	University of Aberdeen	United Kingdom	45.2
188	The University of Texas at Dallas	United States	45.2
190	Yonsei University	Republic of Korea	45.1
191	Hebrew University of Jerusalem	Israel	45.0
191	University of Illinois at Chicago	United States	45.0
193	Mines ParisTech	France	44.9
194	University of Reading	United Kingdom	44.8
194	George Washington University	United States	44.8
196	University of Dundee	United Kingdom	44.7
197	Florida Institute of Technology	United States	44.6
198	Newcastle University	United Kingdom	44.5
199	Boğaziçi University	Turkey	44.3
199	Tel Aviv University	Israel	44.3

World rankings - South America

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2013-2014 powered by Thomson Reuters are the only global university performance tables to judge world class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook. The top universities rankings employ 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

Rank	Institution	Location	Overall score
226-250	University of São Paulo	Brazil	Data withheld by THE
251-275	University of the Andes	Colombia	Data withheld by THE
301-350	State University of Campinas	Brazil	Data withheld by THE

ORIGINAL: Forbes