Supermassive black holes millions to billions times the mass of our Sun lie at the heart of most, maybe all large galaxies. Some of these power brilliantly luminous, rapidly growing objects called active galactic nuclei that gather and condense enormous quantities of dust, gas and stars.
A newly developed method for microscopically extracting, or "mining," information from genomes could represent a significant boost in the search for new therapeutic drugs and improve science's understanding of basic functions such as how cells communicate with one another.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say that losing the ability to make a particular kind of sugar molecule boosted disease protection in early hominids, and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, the genus Homo.
Combining recently launched green technology for navigating the oceans with the need to address gaps in critical earthquake information across the globe, scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have been granted $1.02 million from the National Science Foundation to develop a cutting-edge deep-ocean seismic system. With contributions from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Foundation for Earth Sciences in La Jolla, Calif., and Liquid Robotics Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Kamuela, Hawaii, the total project is valued at $1.46 million.
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine may lead to a way to prevent the progression, or induce the regression, of lung injury that results from use of the anti-cancer chemotherapy drug Bleomycin. Pulmonary fibrosis caused by this drug, as well as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) from unknown causes, affect nearly five million people worldwide. No therapy is known to improve the health or survival of patients.
Conditions like atherosclerosis and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) – the most common cause of blindness among the elderly in western societies – are strongly linked to increased oxidative stress, the process in which proteins, lipids and DNA damaged by oxygen free radicals and related cellular waste accumulate, prompting an inflammatory response from the body’s innate immune system that results in chronic disease.
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