National Science Foundation
Biologists have genetically mapped the sex chromosomes of several species of cichlid fish from Lake Malawi, East Africa, and identified a mechanism by which new sex chromosomes may evolve.
Berkeley, CA - BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is the most ambitious attempt yet to map the expansion history of the Universe using the technique known as baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO).
CORVALLIS, Ore. -- The catastrophic decline around the world of "apex" predators such as wolves, cougars, lions or sharks has led to a huge increase in smaller "mesopredators" that are causing major economic and ecological disruptions, a new study concludes.
BATON ROUGE -- For Sophie Warny, LSU assistant professor of geology and geophysics and curator at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, years of patience in analyzing Antarctic samples with low fossil recovery finally led to a scientific breakthrough.
In a feat of reverse-engineering, Christian Braudrick of University of California at Berkeley and three coauthors have successfully built and maintained a scale model of a living meandering gravel-bed river in the lab. Their findings point to the importance of vegetation to reinforce the banks and, surprisingly, to the importance of sand in healthy meandering river life.
WASHINGTON -- Plumes of harmful air pollutants can be transported across oceans and continents -- from Asia to the United States and from the United States to Europe -- and have a negative impact on air quality far from their original sources, says a new report by the National Research Council.
Results of a new study add evidence that climate swings in the northern hemisphere over the past 12,000 years have been tightly linked to changes in the tropics.
EAST LANSING, Mich. - It's been cultivated for at least 7,000 years and spread from South America to grow on every continent except Antarctica. Now the humble potato has had its genome sequenced.
Results: MIT engineers have designed a retinal implant for people who have lost their vision from retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, two of the leading causes of blindness. The retinal prosthesis would help restore some vision by electrically stimulating the nerve cells that normally carry visual input from the retina to the brain.
September 22, 2009 -- Mathematicians from North America, Europe, Australia, and South America have resolved the first one trillion cases of an ancient mathematics problem. The advance was made possible by a clever technique for multiplying large numbers. The numbers involved are so enormous that if their digits were written out by hand they would stretch to the moon and back.
(Santa Barbara, California) -- New technologies may change our lives for the better, but sometimes they have risks. Communicating those benefits and risks to the public, and developing regulations to deal with them, can be difficult -- particularly if there's already public opposition to the technology.
A new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder indicates most of the world's low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk.
President Obama named nine researchers as recipients of the National Medal of Science, and four inventors and one company as recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honors bestowed by the United States government on scientists, engineers, and inventors. The recipients will receive their awards on October 7 at a White House ceremony.
Whether for introduced muskrats in Europe or oak trees in the United Kingdom, zebra mussels in United States lakes or agricultural pests around the world, scientists have tried to find new ways of controlling invasive species by learning how these animals and plants take over in new environs.
LA JOLLA, Calif., September 17, 2009 -- Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego), The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) and other institutions have constructed a complete model, including three dimensional protein structures, of the central metabolic network
