Washington, U.S.A. — U.S. News & World Report, providers of service news and information, released on October 23, the fifth annual edition of the World’s Best Universities rankings. For the past two years, the United Kingdom’s University of Cambridge topped the list, but this year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology jumped from third to first. The 2012 World’s Best rankings, which include colleges and universities in the United States and across the globe, are available online at www.usnews.com/worldsbest.

The World’s Best Universities rankings, updated annually by U.S. News, are based on the 2012 QS World University Rankings, developed by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a leading global career and education network. Using a different methodology and ranking data than the well-known U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, the World’s Best Universities rates schools on factors such as academic reputation, the proportion of international faculty, and the proportion of international students.

“As the job market becomes more competitive, there’s a growing interest among prospective students to attend institutions abroad,” said U.S. News & World Report Editor and Chief Content Officer Brian Kelly. “The World’s Best Universities rankings help students compare and select the best schools worldwide. In addition, the rankings enable our readers to understand more fully how well American institutions perform when compared with other institutions of higher learning around the world.”

The World’s Best Universities rankings are among the most comprehensive of their kind and include the following lists: Top 400 Universities Worldwide, Top 100 Asian Universities, and Top 100 Latin American Universities. In addition to the regional rankings, there are also global rankings in 25 different subject disciplines, such as electrical engineering, accounting and finance, biological sciences, and the newly added communication and media studies.

An in-depth methodology was used to determine the 2012 rankings. For the Top 400 Universities, six distinct indicators of excellence were evaluated: academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, proportion of international faculty, proportion of international students, and citations per faculty. The two regional rankings each have distinct methodologies from the global Top 400 to better reflect the uniqueness of those regions, using indicators such as the specific region’s academic and employer reputations, citations per paper, and proportion of staff with Ph.D’s.

For additional information on the 2012 ranking of the World’s Best Universities, please visit www.usnews.com/worldsbest.

World’s Best Universities Rankings 2012

* For the full list of rankings, visit www.usnews.com/worldsbest

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Twin NASA spacecraft that achieved orbit around the moon New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day have new names thanks to elementary students in Bozeman, Montana. Their winning entry, “Ebb and Flow,” was selected as part of a nation-wide school contest that began in October 2011.

The names were submitted by fourth graders from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School. Nearly 900 classrooms with more than 11,000 students from 45 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, participated in the contest. Previously named Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL A and B, the washing machine-sized spacecraft begin science operations in March.

“The 28 students of Nina DiMauro’s class at the Emily Dickinson Elementary School have really hit the nail on the head,” said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We were really impressed that the students drew their inspiration by researching GRAIL and its goal of measuring gravity. Ebb and Flow truly capture the spirit and excitement of our mission.”

Zuber and Sally Ride, America’s first woman in space and CEO of Sally Ride Science in San Diego, selected the names following the contest, which attracted 890 proposals via the Internet and mail. The contest invited ideas from students ages 5 to 18 enrolled in U.S. schools. Although everything from spelling and grammar to creativity were considered, Zuber and Ride primarily took into account the quality of submitted essays.

“With submissions from all over the United States and even some from abroad, there were a lot of great entries to review,” Ride said. “This contest generated a great deal of excitement in classrooms across America, and along with it an opportunity to use that excitement to teach science.”

GRAIL is NASA’s first planetary mission carrying instruments fully dedicated to education and public outreach. Each spacecraft carries a small camera called GRAIL MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students). Thousands of students in grades five through eight will select target areas on the lunar surface and send requests for study to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center in San Diego.

The winning prize for the Dickinson students is to choose the first camera images. Dickinson is one of nearly 2,000 schools registered for the MoonKAM program, which is led by Ride and her team at Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego.

“These spacecraft represent not only great science but great inspiration for our future,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division in Washington. “As they study our lunar neighbor, Ebb and Flow will undergo nearly the same motion as the tides we feel here on Earth.”

Launched in September 2011, Ebb and Flow will be placed in a near-polar, near-circular orbit with an altitude of about 34 miles (55 kilometers). During their science mission, the duo will answer longstanding questions about the moon and give scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.

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