The results of a new national UMass Poll released March 18 show strong public support for an assault weapons ban and a broad consensus in favor of a higher federal minimum wage. Additionally, President Barack Obama enjoys high personal favorability, while House Speaker John Boehner is viewed as equally unfavorable.
Respondents were asked about a variety of topics, including which issues they viewed as most important, about how favorably they view various government officials, and their personal views on a number of hot-topic issues such as minimum wage, gun control, the Voting Rights Act,
Professor Max Page of the Art, Art History and Architecture Department, is one of three scholars nationally named to receive the Rome Prize for Historic Preservation and Conservation, awarded annually by the American Academy in Rome to honor “the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities.”
In one of the earliest experiments using a humanoid robot to deliver speech and physical therapy to a stroke patient, researchers in Communication Disorders and Computer Science saw notable speech and physical therapy gains and significant improvement in quality of life.
A newly formed institute that serves as a campus-wide umbrella to coordinate campus diversity initiatives in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) has received a four-year, $1.6 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund one-year internships for post-baccalaureate students from underrepresented groups interested in biomedical and biobehavioral research.
When researchers led by Microbiology professor Derek Lovley discovered that the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens conducts electricity very effectively along metallic-like “microbial nanowires,” they found physicists quite comfortable with the idea of such a novel biological electron transfer mechanism, but not biologists.