Seeker, Doer, Giver, Ponderer - NYTimes.com

Seeker, Doer, Giver, Ponderer - NYTimes.com: James H. Simons... His passion... is basic research — the risky, freewheeling type. He recently financed new telescopes in the Chilean Andes that will look for faint ripples of light from the Big Bang, the theorized birth of the universe.

The afternoon of the interview, he planned to speak to Stanford physicists eager to detect the axion, a ghostly particle thought to permeate the cosmos but long stuck in theoretical limbo.

Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science - NYTimes.com

Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science - NYTimes.com: Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration.

Join the Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge And Do Something Amazing

Join the Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge And Do Something Amazing: #CrowdGrant is a brand-new partnership with RocketHub—a premiere crowdfunding platform—that's now accepting the best and brightest project proposals in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and other future-shaping fields.

Artificial Photosynthesis Effort Takes Root

Artificial Photosynthesis Effort Takes Root: To speed up materials discovery, researchers at the Caltech hub, who collaborate with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and more than 20 other research centers, have developed an ink-jet printing process that can churn out millions of slightly different variations on promising catalysts. Each sample is as small as a pixel on a screen. They're also developing equipment that can quickly test the activity of each catalyst. "It will dramatically accelerate the rate of electrocatalyst and photocatalyst discovery from a few candidates a year to a few every few milliseconds, producing thousands to millions per day..."

Fund a uStartup

Fund a uStartup: uStartups is a special crowdfunding donation platform created to promote the maturation of university science and engineering projects to the point where they have real world impacts. uStartups is a crowdfunding platform so that donors can provide this crucial research “maturation” funding to faculty and student researchers so that they can continue their science and technology-based university inventions once the federal funding dries up. The funding provided by uStartups donors is essential to help university researchers move their discoveries into concrete, real life products and services for patients and users around the world.

Theoretical physicists win massive awards : Nature News & Comment

Theoretical physicists win massive awards : Nature News: Yuri Milner, who has made his fortune investing in social-media companies, announced the newly created Fundamental Physics Prize this morning. The winners work on difficult problems ranging from the Universe's early inflation to string theory (see 'Theoretical millionaires').

At $3 million a head, the new prize dwarfs the Nobel Prize, which this year is valued at around SEK8 million ($1.2 million)...

Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford University in California, found out about his good fortune only late last week...

A Kickstarter for Academic Research

A Kickstarter for Academic Research: The website was created in 2008 by Borya Shakhnovich, at the time an assistant professor in Bioinformatics at Boston University. Shakhnovich hopes that reducing funding time from 18 months (under a typical NIH grant review process) to about 30 days, which is typical for crowd-sourced funding, will attract the interest of NGOs and larger organizations who could use the platform to have research proposals quickly and cheaply vetted.

Crowdfunding for Research Dollars: A Cure for Science’s Ills? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

Crowdfunding for Research Dollars: A Cure for Science’s Ills? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network: As I mentioned earlier, I am one of the co-organizers of the #SciFund Challenge, a volunteer-run science crowdfunding organization. We train scientists how to run crowdfunding projects, provide community, and also provide some publicity once projects launch. We currently have 75 amazing science crowdfunding projects that are running for the month of May. You can find the projects listed by category at scifundchallenge.org or directly at scifund.rockethub.com.