Sallie Mae, the country's largest provider of student loans, has found itself on the receiving end of political attacks regarding its domination of the student loans market, according to an article in Wednesday's issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. These attacks surfaced after two reports were issued Tuesday by the American Enterprise Institute and the Education Sector claiming that Sallie Mae manages $142 billion in student loans, which constituted twenty-seven percent of the federal student loan market in 2005. The purpose of the reports is to pressure Congress into reducing Sallie Mae's market domination at a time when the public corporation is being bought by two private-equity firms for $25 billion.
Seventy-six-year-old media tycoon Rupert Murdoch may purchase Facebook.com, according to a report issued Tuesday by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Citing a report by online journalist Dan Farber, the Chronicle noted that Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, recently "spent some quality time at brainstorm meetings" with Murdoch. Farber's report emphasized that while the deal is as of yet only speculation, Murdoch has a pattern of amassing multiple types of media, such as newspapers and television networks. In 2005, Murdoch purchased MySpace for $580 million.
In an article published in the Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, research by Chelsea Wood '06 concluded that parasitic organisms can have a negative effect on a host's environment. Wood, the lead author of the paper, researched Littorina littorea, a species of snail, at Shoals Marine Laboratory the summer before her senior year. Wood discovered that snails infected by parasites consume significantly less algae, indicating that parasites can impact organisms and environments with which they have no direct interaction. Wood conducted her research under the advisement of Kathryn Cottingham, a professor of biological sciences at Dartmouth, and James Byers, a professor of zoology at the University of New Hampshire.
