Obama promotes community colleges

Obama promotes community colleges

WASHINGTON

President Barack Obama used a special White House conference Tuesday to tout the nation’s community colleges as offering a path to the American dream for underprivileged citizens and as essential centers for training the 21st-century work force.

Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, introduced Obama during the first White House meeting on community colleges. She has been a community- college professor for the past 17 years and a tireless advocate for the two-year schools.

2 win physics Nobel

NEW YORK

It is the thinnest and strongest material known to mankind — no thicker than a single atom and 100 times tougher than steel. Could graphene be the next plastic? Maybe so, says one of two scientists who won a Nobel Prize on Tuesday for isolating and studying it.

Some scientists say we can’t even imagine what kinds of products might be possible with the substance, which hides in ordinary pencil lead.

Two Russian-born researchers, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester in England, shared the physics Nobel for their groundbreaking experiments with graphene, which is a sheet of carbon atoms joined together in a pattern that resembles chicken wire.

Study links noise, heart-disease risk

LONDON

What’s bad for your ears also may be bad for your heart. According to a new study, people who work in noisy places could have triple the risk of a serious heart problem compared with those who work in quiet environments, a new study says.

Gan Wenqi of the University of British Columbia examined more than 6,000 people who were at least 20 years old and employed, in a U.S. health survey from 1999 to 2004.

Most of the study participants working in loud workplaces were men age 40 and were more likely to have other heart risk factors such as having a higher-than-normal Body Mass Index and smoking. After statistically adjusting for those variables, Gan still found people working in loud places had a higher chance of heart disease.

Japanese-American vets to be honored

WASHINGTON

Nearly 69 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans to internment camps, President Barack Obama signed legislation Tuesday awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to aging Japanese-American World War II veterans.

A handful of Japanese- American veterans and lawmakers joined Obama in the Oval Office where he signed the legislation awarding the medal to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion, known as the “Go for Broke” fighting units, as well as the 6,000 Japanese-Americans who served in the Military Intelligence Services during WWII.

Combined dispatches