The Foundation established the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) in 2009 to achieve major advances in understanding of carbon, the element of life, in geologically diverse deep continental and marine environments. The Observatory's plan includes a component whose objective is to describe the types of life that occur, their adaptive and evolutionary strategies, and the limits-and possibly origins-of life. In fact, evidence exists for life in all deep environments where there is liquid water. The environments include oil wells, deep granitic and basaltic aquifers, sandstone cores, clays, gold seams, and deep marine sediments. With Foundation support, an international network of microbiologists and geneticists headquartered at Oregon State University will begin a comprehensive survey of the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in representative deep environments. Earth's microbes probably amount to 90% or more of all life. The total number of cells might be a nonillion, one thousand times one billion times one billion times one billion, or 10 to the 30th power, and the subsurface biomass may be 90% of all microbial cells. For many environments, however, there are no or sparse data, and the diversity is just now being explored thanks to new gene sequencing technologies. A key technology is "pyrotag" sequencing, which allows low-cost processing of massive amounts of DNA. The method has been applied to very few samples from deep environments. As a base, this project would examine well-preserved samples from four deep settings chosen for their variety and extensive contextual information, for example, permafrost more than 600 meters below the surface on continents. A community meeting in the second year of the project will help build the global network of experts in deep life to achieve the eventual DCO goals.

This grant funds efforts by the American Council of Learned Societies to ensure the timely completion of the definitive edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, one of the major international scholarly initiatives of the past half-century. Foundation funds will leverage a unique opportunity for a multimillion dollar package of grants that will ensure the editorial integrity of the project and guarantee its completion at least three years ahead of schedule. The Foundation has supported this project since 1983 and thus far, the award-winning The Correspondence of Charles Darwin has produced 20 volumes in its projected 30-volume collection. The 35-year project has won accolades from the scholarly community, including the Queens Anniversary Prize. Not only have the 15,000 letters Darwin exchanged with 2,000 correspondents been located and collected, they have been transcribed and edited with meticulous care, including superb contextual notes and longer essays. They have also been made freely available on the Web. The letters not only offer insight into Darwin's mind-he used them to communicate with scientific colleagues, to discuss ideas, and to gather data-but they also offer an accessible route into his published writings.

This grant supports a project by MIT's Richard Lester to create a new executive-level course designed to promote the safe and responsible use of nuclear power worldwide and to provide leadership education and training in the strategies, operational practices, and technologies required to develop a safe, successful civilian nuclear energy program. The new course would be built on MIT's very successful and self-sufficient Reactor Technology Course for Utility Executives (RTC), now in its 18th year and offered in partnership with the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations. The curriculum would provide training for senior executives as well as government officials in countries considering building their first nuclear power plants, in countries in the early stages of implementing a civilian nuclear power program, or in countries which are restarting a civilian nuclear power program after an extended period of dormancy. Particular emphasis would target potential nuclear countries in the developing world, including Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Indonesia, Turkey, Vietnam, Egypt, and Jordan. This project represents a unique opportunity for Sloan to contribute to the safe development of new civilian nuclear power programs around the world.

In 2009, the Foundation approved a grant to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to support its work helping the world's nuclear power plant vendors develop a voluntary Code of Conduct. The effort has made significant progress and funds from this grant support the Carnegie Endowment's continuing efforts to advance the project. The Code text now contains sections on safety, health and radiological protection, physical security, environmental protection and the handling of irradiated fuel and nuclear waste, compensation for nuclear damage, nonproliferation and safeguards, and ethics. Drawing, where possible, on existing international agreements and International Atomic Energy Agency recommendations, the Code would pledge complying vendors to a standard of behavior higher than would be expected in its absence or than has been true historically. While the Code, once agreed upon, will be voluntary, it promises to be highly significant in influencing the behavior of power plant vendors. Hopefully it will be incorporated into each company's own code of business conduct, making it essentially mandatory for them. Moreover, the Code's very public nature and the scrutiny of environmental and nonproliferation advocacy groups will help guarantee vendor compliance.

This grant provides continuing support to Columbia University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for three more years of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays and produce short films about science and technology. Activities supported through this grant include the provision of faculty mentors and science advisors for students working on science-themed film projects, two annual awards for production of short films on science and technology, two annual awards to develop promising feature film scripts with science content, and networking events with select film industry producers, agents, and managers.

This grant provides continuing support to Carnegie Mellon University, one of the Foundation's six film school partners, for three more years of activities designed to encourage top film students to develop screenplays about science and technology. Activities supported under this grant include a symposium featuring internationally recognized scientists and technologists discussing current work in their fields; two semesters of training in screenwriting, guest-faculty workshops by accomplished screenwriting mentors; consultations by scientists and technologists on scripts in progress; the presentation of two awards for outstanding student screenplays exploring scientific themes or featuring scientists or technologists as characters, and activities to promote student career advancement, including industry showcases in Los Angeles and New York.

This grant funds three years of the Sloan Science-in-Film initiative by the Sundance Institute, which runs the Sundance Film Festival, the premiere independent film festival in the U.S. Funds will support four annual components of the initiative: a commissioning grant, a feature film fellowship, a $20,000 best Science and Technology feature film prize, and a panel of filmmakers and scientists followed by an awards reception.

Swarthmore College is studying the migration of undergraduates into and out of STEM disciplines. In 2009 the Foundation supported efforts by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), the umbrella organization of 47 public, historically black universities, law schools and medical schools, to enable them to explore the possibility of some of their member campuses joining the Swarthmore-led STEM migration project or launching a similar project. Fund from this follow-on grant will enable 20 of the TMCF member campuses to join the Swarthmore-led project. The addition of 20 TMCF campuses to the STEM migration project would provide the basis for these campuses to improve STEM retention, provide a broader basis for each of the 44 campuses to compare its own performance with that of others, greatly expand the project's data on African American students, and facilitate further fundraising to sustain the project to which both Swarthmore College and TMCF are committed.

In February 2009 the Foundation funded a project by Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to enable them to develop a national strategy for enhancing the completion rate in STEM master's degrees. With these funds, CGS surveyed what was known about this subject, produced a paper that summarized what is known, outlined a research agenda for improving knowledge about what affects attrition and completion rates, and began laying out a taxonomy of STEM master's degrees. They also convened a meeting of researchers, graduate deans, and others to discuss the paper and what CGS could and should do further in this area. The strategy that emerged from this preliminary work calls for a two-phased follow-on program. The first phase, funding for which is provided through this grant, would (a) further develop a taxonomy of STEM master's programs; (b) establish standardized definitions for "entry", "attrition", and "completion" in STEM master's programs; (c) provide a first look at comparable completion and attrition rates within STEM master's programs in a variety of programs in a selected number of institutions; and (d) determine factors perceived to affect student success or attrition and identify promising practices to foster student success. Based on what is learned from all this, CGS will decide whether a second phase is warranted that would gather data on completion and attrition from a larger, more representative set of institutions and track implementation and effects of promising interventions designed to improve outcomes for all or a subset of STEM master's degree types.

One of the objectives of Sloan's Indoor Environment program is to support targets of opportunity that will help to advance research and knowledge about the indoor microbial environment. Funds from this grant support research on the indoor microbial environment by a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research plan has three objectives: 1) to investigate the processes of microbial community assembly in the indoor environment; 2) to obtain an understanding of the relationship between building design, external climate, and interior microbial community; and 3) to improve instrumentation to measure volatile, organic compounds derived from microbes, microbial toxins, and allergens in indoor air. The Berkeley team's project complements existing Foundation grants supporting the Biology and Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon, which is developing a predictive science of the built environment microbiome through partnerships between architects and biologists; a major ongoing research project to catalog the indoor microbial world at the University of Colorado at Boulder; a project to study New York City air and to develop a single cell genomics pipeline at the J. Craig Venter Institute, and efforts by the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole to examine the rare biosphere in drinking water.