Here’s a quick roundup of local science news this morning. Not a comprehensive list…I’ll add more as I find more.

The Broad Institute has been awarded $48 million from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI, part of the National Institutes of Health), establishing it as one of the institute’s three “large-scale DNA sequencing centers” (along with the genome centers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, MO and the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX.) Much of the new money will fund work in medical sequencing, namely the development of the Cancer Genome Atlas, a project launched last year by NHGRI and the National Cancer Institute to identify genomic changes associated with cancer.

Marine biologists have been saying in recent years (example: recent report published in Science) that ocean biodiversity is doomed if we keep up current rates of fishing and other activities harmful to ocean life.

So a New England-based conservation group, the Conservation Law Foundation, along with World Wildlife Fund-Canada, are releasing a report today calling for the creation of a marine reserve, covering about 20 percent of the ocean from Cape Cod up towards Nova Scotia, according to the Boston Globe. The area would be 2.5 times the size of New England and would be a no-go zone for commercial fishing boats, oil drillers and miners. Other human activities would be curtailed as well, like shipping. Some valuable fishing grounds are included in this area so we can probably anticipate opposition to the plan. Fishing groups aren’t commenting until they see the report, the article said.

2005 was a record-breaking year in the number of science and engineering PhD’s awarded at US universities, increasing, according to a recent report released by the National Science Foundation. That number increased by 6.5 percent from 2004, the 3rd yearly increase in a row and the biggest in a decade. Not surprisingly, the fastest growing group of PhD recipients: the non-US citizens. In 2005, their numbers grew 13.4 percent, making up 41 percent of the total.

There’s also this related NSF-funded 180-page report that came out recently about all doctorate recipients in the US. We’ll be running a “Datapoints” article soon to give you the quick summary of it.