The TopUniversities.com guide to the latest higher education news from around the world, on 7 May 2013.
US: University athlete gives up career to donate bone marrow to cancer patient
Cameron Lyle, a student at the University of New Hampshire, is giving up his career as an athlete competing in the highest division of US university sports in order to donate his bone marrow. The student had joined a donors’ registry two years ago, but had been told that the chances of being matched with a non-family member were one in five million. However, when he received the call saying that he was a match with a 28 year old cancer patient who would otherwise only have six months to live, he quickly agreed. However it was at a cost; the surgery will rule out him out of competing in the shot put and hammer throw events at East Conference championship – meaning that his university sporting career is pretty much over, reports ABC News. The patient and donor will not be allowed to meet until one year after the operation, though Lyle says he would very much like to meet him when it’s allowed.
US: Nine year old enters international honor society
It seems some people like to start young. Last week we ran a story about a 16 year old who had been accepted into Harvard after finishing her degree at University of Colorado at Boulder. Today we have news that a nine year old student at a community college in California has been accepted into Phi Theta Kappa – an international honor society for community college students which counts journalists Jim Lehrer (PBS anchor) and Mirta Ojita (Pulitzer Prize winning writer for Miami Herald and New York Times) among its alumni. Tanishq Abraham was discovered to be a genius at the age of four, when he scored in the 99.9% percentile in an IQ test (so only 0.1% of takers scored higher). He aims to attend the University of California, Davis and become a medical researcher in the future, reports ABC News. Oh, and if you thought his parents didn’t have enough to be smug about, it turns out that his seven year old sister is also a certified genius…
US/Russia: Newly-discovered wasp to be named after University of California, Riverside
To again refer back to an earlier story, we reported in January that an astronomer had opted to name an asteroid he discovered after the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at which he had studied. Well, the University of California, Riverside has now also entered the list of institutions after which things have been named. However Gonatocerus ucriisn’t anything as pleasant as a celestial body – no, it’s actually a species of wasp – a really freaky looking one to boot. The insect was discovered in Russia by Serguei V. Triapitsyn, principal museum scientist at the university’s Entomology (that’s the study of insects) Research Museum. He had captured the wasps during a research trip between 1999 and 2002, reports Science Daily.
China: Completion of Duke University Kunshan campus delayed
The completion of the construction of Duke University’s campus in Kunshan, China has been delayed until fall 2014, reports The Duke Chronicle. The campus’ six buildings were due to be completed in the spring of 2014, but after a year where barely any construction took place, a fifth significant delay has been confirmed. Until September last year, the contactors had led Duke University officials to believe that five of the buildings would be ready by July this year. The city of Kunshan is responsible for the construction and of the campus, for which it is also paying. The university is also still waiting for approval to award degrees from the Chinese Ministry of Education.
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US: Graduate wears wedding dress under robe at degree ceremony
Cassie Dotts, a graduate of Washington State University, decided last weekend to combine two of the most significant ceremonies of her life by wearing her wedding dress underneath her cap and gown when receiving her doctorate in veterinary medicine. Her wedding had taken place the previous day in Idaho, reports the Huffington Post, and she chose to combine the two for people who wanted to see her both as a graduate and a newlywed. Her husband, Ben Ho, had studied fisheries science at the University of Idaho.