Technology & Engineering

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The Latest

$11.8 Million in Support from Gary and Mary West to Launch Geriatric Emergency Department

Local philanthropists Gary and Mary West have provided $11.8 million to the University of California San Diego to create a state-of-the-art senior emergency care unit to be housed within the Emergency Department at the future Jacobs Medical Center. The Gary and Mary West Senior Emergency Care Unit will enhance care for older adults and enable a multi-year medical research initiative in partnership with the West Health Institute to support their mission of making successful aging a reality for seniors in San Diego and the nation.

Two-Day ‘Hackathon for Startups’ Hopes to Spark Student Innovations

The new “Startup UCSD,” described as a two-day hackathon for startups, encourages the creative, innovative, and problem-solving students at UC San Diego to bring their ideas to a venue where workshops, professional advisors, and campus resources can help bring those ideas to fruition.

Three Earth-Sized Planets Found Orbiting a Tiny Nearby Star

An international team of astronomers composed of UC San Diego astrophysicists has discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting near the “habitable zone” of an ultracool dwarf star, the first planets ever discovered around such a tiny and dim star.

‘Adaptive Protein Crystal’ Could Form New Kind of Protective Material

Chemists at UC San Diego have created an “adaptive protein crystal” with a counterintuitive and potentially useful property: When stretched in one direction, the material thickens in the perpendicular direction, rather than thinning as familiar materials do. And when squeezed in one dimension, it shrinks in the other rather than expanding, and gets denser in the process.

How DNA Can Take on the Properties of Sand or Toothpaste

When does DNA behave like sand or toothpaste? When the genetic material is so densely packed within a virus, it can behave like grains of sand or toothpaste in a tube. That’s essentially what biophysicists at UC San Diego discovered when they began closely examining the physical properties of DNA jammed inside viruses.

Bioengineers Create First Online Search Engine for Functional Genomics Data

University of California San Diego bioengineers have created what they believe to be the first online search engine for functional genomics data. This new search engine, called GeNemo, is free for public use at: http://www.genemo.org.