The Daily Populous

A Chinese Cheating Ring at UCLA Reveals an Industry Devoted to Helping International Students Scam Grades

After moving to the United States from Beijing, he majored in biology at UCLA and volunteered at the Boys & Girls Club.

So it came as a surprise when, on a Tuesday morning in March, federal authorities arrested him on suspicion of facilitating an international cheating ring.

Any other day the UCLA bust might have made national headlines, but the news got swamped by a bigger, sexier college cheating scandal: Operation Varsity Blues.

Few suggest that Chinese students, who make up a third of all international students in the U.S., cheat at higher rates than students from other foreign countries.

In 2015 federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania indicted 15 Chinese nationals for a standardized test-taking scheme similar to the UCLA case.

As supply follows demand, an entire industry has sprouted to help Chinese college applicants and students cheat.

(In 2017 the Chinese state-run Global Times ran a trend story about foreign students, including Americans, cheating at Chinese universities.). »

Researchers use sunlight to pull hydrogen from wastewater

Authored by acee.princeton.edu

Hydrogen is a critical component in the manufacture of thousands of common products from plastic to fertilizers, but producing pure hydrogen is expensive and energy intensive.

Now, a research team at Princeton University has harnessed sunlight to isolate hydrogen from industrial wastewater.

The technique uses a specially-designed chamber with a “swiss-cheese” black silicon interface to split water and isolate hydrogen gas. »

Buzz Aldrin: It's time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars

Authored by greenwichtime.com

Buzz Aldrin: It's time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars.

Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 27 Caption Close Buzz Aldrin: It's time to focus on the great migration of humankind to Mars 1 / 27 Back to Gallery.

The United States' eyes - and our unified commitment - should focus on opening the door, in our time, to the great migration of humankind to Mars. »

Now for Wrath, Now for Ruin: Hope and Despair at the Battle of Helm's Deep

Authored by filmschoolrejects.com

Théoden seems confident that this will be enough to protect his people and he boasts that the Deeping Wall has never been breached.

Taking place almost entirely at night and in the rain, the sheer scale of this battle sequence was unheard of in film at the time.

It took three and a half months of freezing night shoots to finish the sequence. »

Alaska will connect to the continental US via a 100-terabit fiber optic network

Authored by theverge.com

Alaska has, on average, some of the slowest internet connections in the country, primarily due to its distance from the rest of the continental United States.

MTA Fiber Holdings announced today that it would build the “first and only all-terrestrial” fiber optic network running from Alaska and into the Lower 48.

This new fiber optic network will have the initial capacity to deliver 100 terabits per second. »