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Obese Children’s Brains More Responsive to Sugar

A new study led by researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine finds that the brains of obese children literally light up differently when tasting sugar.

Cells Can Use Dynamic Patterns to Pluck Signals From Noise

Scientists have discovered a general principle for how cells could accurately transmit chemical signals despite high levels of noise in the system, they report in Science this week.

The Story of a Bizarre Deep-sea Bone Worm Takes an Unexpected Twist

The saga of the Osedax “bone-eating” worms began 12 years ago, with the first discovery of these deep-sea creatures that feast on the bones of dead animals. The Osedax story grew even stranger when researchers found that the large female worms contained harems of tiny dwarf males.

Student Entrepreneurs Find Success with Smart Earplugs

When Daniel Lee enrolled in Nate Delson’s Product Design and Entrepreneurship class at UC San Diego, becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t on his radar. But a little more than a year later, Lee and two other students at the Jacobs School of Engineering already have raised more than $450,000 through crowdfunding for their start-up company, Hush Technology. Their product? Smart wireless earplugs that block out external sounds but still allow users to hear their alarm clock and important messages via a smartphone app.

Team Assembled by UC San Diego’s Makeig Wins $300K Award for Music-and-Science Initiative

Scott Makeig, research scientist and director of the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Institute for Neural Computation of UC San Diego, has brought together a research group from four UC campuses who have won a $300,000 President’s Research Catalyst Award, one of five such awards across the UC system announced by President Janet Napolitano.

Physicists Explain Puzzling Particle Collisions

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.