EAST LANSING, Mich. — Climate change is already having an effect on the safety of the world’s food supplies and unless action is taken it’s only going to get worse, a Michigan State University professor told a symposium at this year’s meeting of …
In 2011 the Earth’s population will reach 7 billion. The United Nations (UN) reports that the total number of people will climb to 9 billion in 2050, peak at 9.5 billion, stabilize temporarily, and then decline. Despite the confidence with which…
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Ask any political leader if they are in favor of sustainability, and the pat answer is typically a resounding, “Yes.”
Evaluating its effectiveness, however, is a much trickier endeavor. Thomas Dietz, a sociology and enviro…
University of Rochester optics professor Jannick Rolland has developed an optical technology that provides unprecedented images under the skin’s surface. The aim of the technology is to detect and examine skin lesions to determine whether they a…
Inexpensive hydrogen for automotive or jet fuel may be possible by mimicking photosynthesis, according to a Penn State materials chemist, but a number of problems need to be solved first.
“We are focused on the hardest way to make fuel,” said Thom…
One bad apple is all it takes to spoil the barrel. And one misfolded protein may be all that’s necessary to corrupt other proteins, forming large aggregations linked to several incurable neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s, Parkinson…
When people on airplanes ask Alan Newell what he works on, he tells them “flower arrangements.”
He could also say “fingerprints” or “sand ripples” or “how plants grow.”
“Most patterns you see, including the ones on sand dunes or fish or t…
ROCHESTER, Minn. — America’s largest general science conference will be the setting next week for seven presentations on how zebrafish changed the classroom in Rochester. Those presenting at the conference in Washington, D.C., include researchers f…
Whether a person avoids novelty or embraces it may depend in part on brain differences that have existed from infancy, new findings suggest. When shown pictures of unfamiliar faces, adults who were shy toddlers showed a relatively high level of activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala. Adults who were more outgoing toddlers showed less activity in this brain structure, which is related to emotion and novelty. The findings appear in the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Saria Mohamed Hassan’s dream of becoming a doctor was interrupted for a year when she left the United States to conduct a brief malaria workshop in Dakar, Senegal, and then found herself stranded in a bureaucratic no-man’s land: Her international student visa had expired while she was away, and her bid to renew it quickly became mired in a massive, ever-growing backlog of cases under review. Faced with a seemingly impenetrable firewall of post-9/11 security procedures, the Sudanese medical student eventually lost a year’s worth of classes at Harvard.
The SARS virus is contagious enough to cause a very large epidemic if left unchecked, but could nonetheless be controlled with rigorous public health measures, two research teams report. These results are being released today by the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Biomedical research and the development of powerful new diagnostic tools will be hobbled in the U.S. if the government fails to adequately fund mathematics, physics and engineering research, major drivers, of progress in biology, according to the executive director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, headquartered at UCSF. Physics underlies powerful medical imaging diagnostics such as MRI and CAT capabilities, while mathematical tools are essential to tease apart complex signaling networks active in nearly all essential cell processes, said Marvin Cassman, PhD. “If we don’t adequately support physics, engineering and mathematics, we put the brakes on medically-related progress as surely as we slow advances in math and physics,” he said.