Robots could roam the Moon within the next three years, thanks to scientists and students across the world who are vying for the Google Lunar XPrize, a $30-million international competition to collect data and images with robots and send them back to the earth.

“The Moon is the hottest real estate in the solar system right now,” said William Pomerantz, senior director of space prizes at the XPrize Foundation, which is sponsoring the competition. “Every major space agency across the planet is looking to go back to the Moon, which means every university that has space research is focusing on the Moon.”

To win the prize, teams must safely land a robot on the Moon’s surface, travel at least 500 meters, and send a specified package of...

Moffett Field, Calif. — An unusual new academic institution called Singularity University, run by a well-known entrepreneur and a futurist known for his claims that computers will soon outsmart human beings, welcomed its first class of students last night. But first the new students posed for a class picture and had a “spit party,” where they submitted saliva samples to have their DNA sequenced.

The premise of the university is that a range of technological fields — including nanotechnology, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence — are advancing more rapidly than many people realize. They’re accelerating exponentially, the university’s leaders argue, and so big changes may soon seem to sweep in all at once, even though...

The University of Kansas will make more of its faculty research free to the public online.

“The University of Kansas has been interested in reforming what has been kind of a dysfunctional system of scholarly communication for years,” said Ada Emmett, an associate librarian at the university. “People fundamentally agree with providing the widest possible access to our scholarship.”

The university already has over 4,400 articles in its digital repository of scholarly work, ScholarWorks, which was opened in 2005. Any new research will be added to that collection, and Ms. Emmett estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 articles are published by the university each year. She will oversee a task force to administer the program. The plan has not yet been finalized, but she hopes it will be in...

YouTube will make its debut in classes at Brigham Young University this fall, after administrators decided to lift a nearly three-year ban on the video-sharing Web site.

As of last Friday, students and faculty and staff members could access YouTube from anywhere on the campus, said a university spokeswoman, Carri Jenkins. Previously, students could choose to view YouTube off the campus, but the site was restricted from all campus computers, including those connected to the Internet in campus housing.

“We looked at the increasing opportunities for educational material and information on YouTube, particularly to be used in the classroom by students and faculty,” Ms. Jenkins said.

The university first restricted access to YouTube in 2006, after administrators said certain content could be found offensive and was inconsistent with the...

A number of new technologies in computer graphics, online searching, and workplace collaboration — many of which may soon become available to colleges and universities — were on display Wednesday at the Microsoft Research TechFair 2009, in Washington D.C.

Many of the 13 projects on exhibit — all of which are under development in Microsoft’s six worldwide labs — involved workplace communication and research. Project designers say the tools could help make academic collaboration, either between students and professors or among universities, much easier.

“Our goal really is, how can we further research, how can we further education, how can we really change the way people think about the work that they do?,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice...

A laptop containing the names and Social Security numbers of some 45,000 Cornell University students and faculty members has been stolen, The Cornell Daily Sun reports.

The computer was stolen earlier this month, when a university employee was correcting file-processing transmission errors and left the computer unattended. In a press release, the university said it will offer a year’s worth of free credit reports, credit monitoring, and identity-theft protection to anyone affected.

On a separate Web page, the university said it would not provide any additional information on...

Northwestern University has put online more than 7,000 rare photographs of East Africa that document the European colonization of the area from 1860 through 1960.

The images made available to the public today in the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs were purchased by the university in 2002 for an undisclosed price.

David L. Easterbrook, curator of the university’s Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, said the collection contains photographs and postcards showing how Europeans used the landscape for commercial purposes, as well as images made by anthropologists that focuse on the daily lives of East Africans. The combination helps document how European colonization changed the area, as well as what existed before the Europeans arrived.

The...

In today’s college classroom, it seems that more students have laptops than don’t. In many lecture halls, professors see several of their students typing away all class long. But some professors have to wonder: how many of them are taking notes, and how many of them are checking Facebook.

To help professors keep students concentrated on class work, several colleges have offered guidelines and suggestions for curbing misuse of computers in class and setting “netiquette” standards, like turning off the computer’s volume before class begins. Other college guides give tips on ways professors can use technology better in their class, as long as they comply with copyright laws.

The University of Wisconsin

Over at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blogs, Mark Bauerlein raised some interesting questions this week about students’ views of cheating.

Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students do not consider their behavior to be cheating.

He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered...

The number of colleges offering applications for their students’ iPhones seems to grow every day. Campus maps, class schedules, and bus routes are some common ones. Now the Medical College of Georgia is pushing apps into new territory: health science education.

Starting today, student with iPhones or iPod Touches can download a calculator that will let budding opticians or ophthalmologists determine intermediate and near vision prescriptions as well as the proper lens curvatures of glasses or contacts. Students can also get an app that determines proper cholesterol levels, another that lists medical abbreviations, and a device called the Medmath Medical Calculator — which churns through 135 common medical calculations, such as cardiac output, Apgar score, and the Abbreviated Mental Test score.

The medical...