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Attacking MRSA with metals from antibacterial clays

Shelley Haydel, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Biodesign Institute.

GPS solution provides 3-minute tsunami alerts

Researchers have shown that, by using global positioning systems (GPS) to measure ground deformation caused by a large underwater earthquake, they can provide accurate warning of the resulting tsunami in...

Climate change may have little impact on tropical lizards

A new Dartmouth College study finds human-caused climate change may have little impact on many species of tropical lizards, contradicting a host of recent studies that predict their widespread extinction...

Promising doped zirconia

Materials belonging to the family of dilute magnetic oxides (DMOs) -- an oxide-based variant of the dilute magnetic semiconductors -- are good candidates for spintronics applications. This is the object...

Bach to the blues, our emotions match music to colors

Whether we're listening to Bach or the blues, our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us feel, according to new research from the...

Can math models of gaming strategies be used to detect terrorism networks?

The answer is yes, according to a paper in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics.

H1N1 discovered in marine mammals

Researchers at UC Davis have discovered the H1N1 flu virus in elephant seals off the coast of central California.Scientists at the University of California, Davis, detected the H1N1 (2009) virus in free-ranging northern elephant seals off the central California coast a year after the human pandemic began, according...

OHSU research team successfully converts human skin cells into embryonic stem cells

Scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have successfully reprogrammed human skin cells to become embryonic stem cells capable of transforming into...

Artificial forest for solar water-splitting

This is a schematic of the nanoscale tree-like heterostructures used for solar-driven water splitting in which TiO2 nanowires (blue) are grown on the upper half of a Si nanowire (gray), and the two semiconductors absorb different regions of the solar spectrum. Insets display photoexcited electron-hole pairs separated at the semiconductor-electrolyte interface to carry out water splitting with the help of co-catalysts (yellow and gray dots).In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to...

How should geophysics contribute to disaster planning?

Earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters often showcase the worst in human suffering -- especially when those disasters strike populations who live in rapidly growing communities in the developing world...

DNA-guided assembly yields novel ribbon-like nanostructures

DNA-tethered nanorods link up like rungs on a ribbonlike ladder -- a new mechanism for linear self-assembly that may be unique to the nanoscale.Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that DNA "linker" strands coax nano-sized rods to line up in way unlike any other spontaneous arrangement of...

World's smallest droplets

This is a three-dimensional view of a proton-lead collision that produced collective flow behavior. The green lines are the trajectories of the sub-atomic particles produced by the collision reconstructed by the CMS tracking system. The red and blue bars represent the energy measured by the instrument's two sets of calorimeters.Physicists may have created the smallest drops of liquid ever made in the lab.

Beautiful 'flowers' self-assemble in a beaker

These false-color SEM images reveal microscopic flower structures created by manipulating a chemical gradient to control crystalline self-assembly."Spring is like a perhaps hand," wrote the poet E. E. Cummings: "carefully / moving a perhaps / fraction of flower here placing / an inch of air there... /...

Invasive crazy ants are displacing fire ants in areas throughout southeastern US

Tawny crazy ants were first discovered in the US in 2002 by a pest control operator in a suburb of Houston, and have since established populations in 21 counties in Texas, 20 counties in Florida, and a few sites in southern Mississippi and southern Louisiana.Invasive "crazy ants" are displacing fire ants in areas across the southeastern United States, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. It's the latest in a history...

The genome sequence of Tibetan antelope sheds new light on high-altitude adaptation

How can the Tibetan antelope live at elevations of 4,000-5,000m on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau? Investigators rom Qinghai University, BGI, and other institutes now provide evidence of genetic factors that may...

Body mass index of low income African-Americans linked to proximity of fast food restaurants

African-American adults living closer to a fast food restaurant had a higher body mass index (BMI) than those who lived further away from fast food, according to researchers at The...

Scientific insurgents say 'Journal Impact Factors' distort science

An ad hoc coalition of unlikely insurgents -- scientists, journal editors and publishers, scholarly societies, and research funders across many scientific disciplines -- today posted an international declaration calling on...

New method proposed for detecting gravitational waves from ends of universe

A new window into the nature of the universe may be possible with a device proposed by scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno and Stanford University that would detect elusive gravity waves from the other end of the cosmos. Their paper describing the device and process was published in the prestigious physics journal <i>Physical Review Letters</i>. Andrew Geraci, assistant professor in the University of Nevada, Reno physics department, demonstrates an apparatus that is of part of an experiment that uses similar technology to his gravitational wave detector. This equipment uses levitated nanospheres in an optical trap for investigations of the gravitational force at the micron length scale, where some theories in high-energy physics predicts there will be a deviation from the Newtonian inverse square law of gravitation.A new window into the nature of the universe may be possible with a device proposed by scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno and Stanford University that would detect...

Research into carbon storage in Arctic tundra reveals unexpected insight into ecosystem resiliency

This image shows the US Arctic LTER greenhouse in peak autumn and early winter.When UC Santa Barbara doctoral student Seeta Sistla and her adviser, environmental studies professor Josh Schimel, went north not long ago to study how long-term warming in the Arctic affects...

Weather on the outer planets only goes so deep

This is an image from the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in August 1989 (NASA). In the middle is the Great Dark Spot, accompanied by bright, white clouds that undergo rapid changes in appearance. To the south of the Great Dark Spot is the bright feature that Voyager scientists nicknamed "Scooter." Still farther south is the feature called "Dark Spot 2," which has a bright core. As each feature moves eastward at a different velocity, they are rarely aligned this way. Wind velocities near the equator are westward, reaching 1300 km/h, while those at higher latitudes are eastward, peaking at 900 km/h.What is the long-range weather forecast for the giant planets Uranus and Neptune? These planets are home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, hurricane-like storms as...

Stacking 2-D materials produces surprising results

New experiments reveal previously unseen effects, could lead to new kinds of electronics and optical devices. Graphene has dazzled scientists, ever since its discovery more than a decade ago, with...

First direct proof of Hofstadter butterfly fractal observed in moiré superlattices

This is an artistic image illustration of a butterfly departing from a graphene moir&#233; pattern formed on the top of an atomically thin boron nitride substrate. Electron energy in such a graphene moir&#233; structure exhibits the butterfly like a self-recursive fractal quantum spectrum.A team of researchers from Columbia University, City University of New York, the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Tohoku University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan,...

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