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Perhaps it’s every kid’s dream – as they slave away at their obligatory school science project -  that their findings will rock the scientific community.

Well, it just so happens – that happened!

A group of ninth-graders at a school in Denmark tried to grow some fast-acting seedlings next to a Wi-Fi router and the little buggers wouldn’t sprout, and kind of died. But the same seeds in a room away from the Wi-Fi thrived.

Mother Nature Network reports:

The students placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum, a type of garden cress, into a room without radiation, and six trays of the seeds into another room next to two routers that according to the girls’ calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone.
Over the next 12 days, the girls observed, measured, weighed and photographed their results. By the end of the experiment the results were blatantly obvious — the cress seeds placed near the router had not grown. Many of them were completely dead. Meanwhile, the cress seeds planted in the other room, away from the routers, thrived.
The experiment earned the girls top honors in a regional science competition and the interest of scientists around the world …  (and) a neuroscience professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, is interested in repeating the experiment in a controlled professional scientific environment

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IMAGE: Mother Nature Network/Kim Horsevad, teacher at Hjallerup Skole in Denmark

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A community college professor forced her students to wear ribbons in support of gay rights and allegedly told her class people who support the traditional definition of marriage are “uneducated bigots” who “attack homosexuals with hate,” reports Todd Starnes of Fox News.

Students in the Tennessee-based Columbia State Community College psychology class were directed to wear “Rainbow Coalition” ribbons for a day and express support for the homosexual community, Travis Barham, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, told Starnes.

Some students objected to the assignment, citing religious exemptions, but Barham told Fox News the professor dismissed students’ concerns as irrelevant.

The students were also barred from defending or explaining any other views regarding homosexual conduct, dismissing such arguments as ‘throwing Bible verses’ at her,” the attorney said.

“When students objected to how she was pushing her personal views on the class, she explained that it is her job ‘to educate the ignorant and uneducated elements of society,’ that oppose this movement’s demands and to correct their ‘hateful and close-minded’ views,” Barham said.

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Robby Soave of The Daily Caller reports:

New York University has loaned millions of dollars to select faculty and administrators for them to buy vacation homes, an unprecedented compensation deal critics say is excessive.

Elite colleges and universities have been known to offer their chief executives all sorts of bonuses, including high pay, cars and second residences.  But NYU may be the first university to help pay for luxurious vacation homes in the Hamptons for not just its president, but  also high profile faculty and administrators.

NYU loaned its president, John Sexton, $1 million  to buy a three-lot beach house on Fire Island. The university helped Law School Dean Richard Revesz pay for two homes: one in West Village and the other on a 65-acre property alongside the Housatonic River, according to The New York Times.

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As if college didn’t already cost too much as it is:

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Fix contributor Ian Tuttle reports for National Review Online on the troubling story of Jared Marcum, a West Virginia eighth grader who now faces criminal charges of “obstructing an officer” after he refused to remove a t-shirt that featured the logo of the National Rifle Association, and school officials called a police officer to compel him.

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The latest New York University research finds that white conservatives tend toward elitism.

That’s the bottom line of the study, but you know academics – they love to use jargon and mumbo-jumbo to couch their findings in esoteric notions. But the long and short of it is this: the study found white conservatives inherently want to keep black people in their place.

Basically, NYU researchers claim through their study that conservatives, and mainly white conservatives, are more likely than liberals to identify mixed-race individuals as black, and that’s because white conservatives want to maintain – to quote researchers – “racial divisions that are part of the historical legacy of the social system in the United States.”

“A person’s race is often thought to be clear-cut and fixed,” Amy Krosch, a doctoral student in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the lead author of the paper, told campus officials. “However, our research suggests that the perception of a person as black or white is related to one’s political views and beliefs about equality.”

So if you show a white conservative a picture of mixed-race individuals such as Tiger Woods or Barack Obama, they’re more likely to say they’re black, as opposed to saying they’re white - an indication of what Krosch described as the link between political views and beliefs about equality.

Here’s the academic-speak to that end:

Their results showed that, indeed, among conservatives, “opposition to equality” was a powerful predictor in the categorization of mixed-race faces as black rather than white. However, this was not the case for “group-based dominance.” “These results suggest that conservatives may be categorizing mixed-race faces as black to justify racial divisions that are part of the historical legacy of the social system in the United States,” the researchers wrote. …

“It seems reasonable to conclude on the basis of these results that bias in the process of racial categorization may reflect, among other things, the motivation to defend and uphold traditional racial divisions that are part of the historical legacy of the United States,” the researchers concluded. “Conservatives exhibit stronger system justification tendencies in general and are presumably more sensitive than liberals to challenges directed at the legitimacy or stability of the social order, with its attendant degree of racial inequality.”

Bottom line, universities love spending their time and our taxpayer dollars trying to prove the white man is racist.

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IMAGE: New York University screenshot

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