In-briefs

If you thought coming from the largest state, the most populated or the richest gave you bragging rights-now try the smartest. Morgan Quitno Press has made this possible thanks to their recently published study on the subject.

Utilizing Education State Rankings, a new annual reference book which compares all 50 states' education systems in 400 categories, Morgan Quitno Press ranked each state based on 21 educational factors. Some factors considered were public high school graduation rates, per pupil expenditures, average class size, student reading and math proficiency, pupil-teacher ratios and teacher salaries.

Connecticut, Vermont, Montana, New Jersey and Maine topped the list, in that order. New Mexico finished last, followed by Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Nevada. The full list can be found on Morgan Quitno's website at morganquitno.com.



Martha Stewart is in hot water; and unfortunately she can't use it for one of her gourmet recipes. U.S. securities regulators announced plans to bring a civil case against the home designer mogul. The only possibility of Stewart's saving face would be to convince regulators of the case's lack of necessity.

Simultaneously, a criminal investigation of Stewart is being conducted by the U.S. attorney's office. The investigations center around Stewart's alleged insider trading.

In December she sold her stock in biotechnology company ImClone for a total of $227,000, the day before the Food and Drug Administration publicly announced its rejection of Erbitux, a promising anti-cancer drug which was produced by ImClone. Sam Waksal, ImClone's founder and Stewart's close friend, pleaded guilty to insider trading charges recently.



A first century burial box discovered in Israel may be the oldest surviving link to Jesus Christ, according to a French scholar. The ossuary, or burial box, is inscribed in Aramaic, "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

Andre Lemaire, the finder of the box, said the writing most likely refers to Jesus of Nazareth. He dates the ossuary to A.D. 63, three decades after the crucifixion and shortly after James' death in A.D. 62, as recorded by the Jewish historian Josephus. Lemaire is a specialist in ancient inscriptions at France's Practical School of Higher Studies.

The names inscribed on the box were all quite common at the time, but Lemaire estimates there were only 20 men named James in Jerusalem during that era who had a father named Joseph and a brother named Jesus. Furthermore, naming the father and the brother on the coffin was unusual-in fact there is only one other recorded instance of this occurring. To have his name recorded on the ossuary, Jesus would most likely have had to be a notable figure.



Always wanted to make great scientific discoveries but never had the expertise or time? With the help of Folding@home and a home computer, you can now aid scientists in discovering medical cures to Parkinson's and other debilitating diseases.

Much like the Seti@home project, wherein the computing power of millions of idle computers is harnessed to search the skies for random radio signals from extraterrestrials, Folding@home assigns participating home computers small chunks of a much larger problem to analyze and perform various functions on.

The program analyzes the folding patterns of protein, a molecule which controls many essential body functions. The three-dimensional folding pattern of protein is a complex process which, when gone awry, is thought to play a role in many diseases.

A single home computer would take all day to simulate one nanosecond of protein folding. Collectively, analysis is conducted much faster. So far Folding@home has recruited 200,000 home computer owners. To volunteer your computer's services, check out http://folding.stanford.edu for more information.



The Nematode worm, small and short-lived, holds great promise for humans wishing to overcome the "middle-age spread." The undesirable propensity to put on pounds while simultaneously losing muscle mass has plagued individuals since the dawn of time-and perhaps that may all change.

Scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey first discovered that Caenorhabditis elegans, the Nematode worm, undergoes the same loss of muscle mass and strength in middle age as humans. Researchers hope that discovering the reason this occurs in the Nematode worm will illuminate the mechanism responsible for the process in humans.

Nematode worms have been a favorite organism for scientific research due to their relative simplicity-959 total cells as an adult-and similarity to humans in key biological mechanisms.

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