May 13, 2015
May 13, 2015 —
Inspired by the way iridescent bird feathers play with light, scientists have created thin films of material in a wide range of pure colors — from red to green — with hues determined by physical structure rather than pigments.
May 1, 2015
May 1, 2015 —
Synthetic microscopic beads sense changes in their environment and self-propel to migrate upstream, a step toward the realization of biomimetic microsystems with the ability to sense and respond to environmental changes.
April 20, 2015
April 20, 2015 —
With a tag, an anchor and a cage that can be unlocked with light, chemists have devised a simple, modular system that can locate proteins at the membrane of a cell.
March 19, 2015
March 19, 2015 —
Astronomers have expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light. Their new instrument has just begun to scour the sky for messages from other worlds.
February 18, 2015
February 18, 2015 —
Nearly every cell in our bodies carries the same genetic code. Yet different types of cells read the same DNA in widely different ways, influenced by chemical chemical tags that modify the genetic material without changing the underlying DNA sequence. Scientists today announced significant progress in the unraveling of the code that guides those differences, a body of information they call the epigenome.
January 6, 2015
January 6, 2015 —
Two UC San Diego astrophysicists together with a colleague at Columbia University have been awarded a 2014 Buchalter Cosmology Prize for a paper proposing a way to significantly enhance cosmological measurements in a way that should enable sensitive tests of ideas fundamental to our understanding of physical laws. The paper by postdoctoral scholar Jonathan Kaufman, physics professor Brian Keating, and Bradley Johnson, professor of physics at Columbia, was posted to the online repository arXiv in September 2014.
December 24, 2014
December 24, 2014 —
When a rapidly-growing cell divides into two smaller cells, what triggers the split? Is it the size the growing cell eventually reaches? Or is the real trigger the time period over which the cell keeps growing ever larger? A novel study published online today in the journal Current Biology has finally provided an answer to this long unsolved conundrum. And it’s not what many biologists expected.
December 22, 2014
December 22, 2014 —
A new analysis of a Martian rock that meteorite hunters plucked from an Antarctic ice field 30 years ago this month reveals a record of the planet's climate billions of years ago, back when water likely washed across its surface and any life that ever formed there might have emerged.
December 10, 2014
December 10, 2014 —
Composite subatomic structures created by powerful collisions of protons have fallen apart in unexpected ways within a detector in the Large Hadron Collider called LHCb.
December 3, 2014
December 3, 2014 —
Stars igniting at rates rarely seen in a distant, massive galaxy are blowing cold, dense gas tens of thousands of light years into space, depleting the galaxy's supply of stellar fuel. The loss will limit future star birth, a driver galactic aging for which evidence has been mounting.