Skip to main content

Florida Career College to Close

Florida Career College to Close Doug Lederman Fri, 01/26/2024 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Doug Lederman from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/avZRfLi

UC Berkeley Will Auction NFTs for 2 Nobel Prize Patents

The University of California, Berkeley, is cashing in on the buzz around NFTs.

Nonfungible tokens -- called NFTs for short -- are units of data stored on the blockchain that are unique and not interchangeable. As NPR recently explained, a $10 bill, which is fungible, could be exchanged for two $5 bills. An NFT is one of a kind, more like a barcode.

The public research university, according to a press release, is auctioning the NFTs for the patent disclosures of two Nobel Prize-winning inventions: CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, for which UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; and cancer immunotherapy, for which James Allison shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The university will continue to own the related patents.

“Someone might ask, ‘Why would I want a digital version of some internal university form?’ Because it represents something magnificent,” Rich Lyons, chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer at Berkeley, said in a statement. “There are people who recognize and care about symbols of great science, and even if they never intend to resell the NFT, they want to own it and they want resources to go back to Berkeley, where the basic research behind these Nobel Prizes came from, to support further research.”

The university will receive 85 percent of the auction price, while the additional 15 percent will go to Foundation, an Ethereum platform on which the auctions will be held. Some of the proceeds will also pay for carbon offsets of the energy costs of minting the NFT.

Ad keywords: 
Is this diversity newsletter?: 
Disable left side advertisement?: 
Is this Career Advice newsletter?: 
Live Updates: 
liveupdates0


from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3oXTRp3

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Is Middle School So Hard for So Many People?

Middle school. The very memory of it prompts disgust. Here’s a thing no one’s thinking: Geez, I wish I still looked the way I did when I was 12. Middle school is the worst. Tweenhood, which starts around age 9 , is horrifying for a few reasons. For one, the body morphs in weird and scary ways. Certain parts expand faster than others, sometimes so fast that they cause literal growing pains; hair grows in awkward locations, often accompanied by awkward smells. And many kids face new schools and a new set of rules for how to act, both socially and academically. But middle school doesn’t have to be like this. It could be okay. It could be good , even. After all, middle schoolers are “kind of the best people on Earth,” says Mayra Cruz, the principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, a public middle school in Washington, D.C. The notion that middle school deserves its own educational ecosystem at all dates back to the 1960s , with a campaign to better accommodate the specific learning ne...

Debacle over review reveals racism in academy (opinion)

When medievalist Mary Rambaran-Olm wrote about having her book review “torpedoed” for not being “more generous” to the book’s authors, no one could have expected that this would send shock waves across the academic community in what became an online maelstrom revealing the extent of white academic gatekeeping, ally performativity and blatant racism. For those of us who work on decentering whiteness in premodern fields such as classics, medieval/early modern studies, archaeology and in or on the Global South, this latest attack targeting a scholar of color exposed what many of us have been trying to draw attention to for years—that racism is deep and pernicious in the so-called liberal and woke academy. Rambaran-Olm was commissioned to review The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe ( HarperCollins ) for the Los Angeles Review of Books because of her expertise in early English medieval literature and history, and because she is one of the leading scholars challenging the...