UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers report that the amyloid cascade hypothesis, long believed to describe the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease, is not a fixed and invariable sequence of events. Rather, early indicators or biomarkers of the neurodegenerative condition vary by individual, making preclinical diagnoses more challenging.
Electrical engineers have broken key barriers that limit the distance information can travel in fiber optic cables and still be accurately deciphered by a receiver. Photonics researchers at the University of California, San Diego have increased the maximum power — and therefore distance — at which optical signals can be sent through optical fibers. This advance has the potential to increase the data transmission rates for the fiber optic cables that serve as the backbone of the internet, cable, wireless and landline networks. The research is published in the June 26 issue of the journal Science.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $5 million grant to support the Simons Array, a new system of three powerful telescopes designed to study the origins of the universe. Led by a team of scientists from UC San Diego, UC Berkeley and the University of Colorado, the Simons Array expands the POLARBEAR project, based in Chile’s Atacama desert, to search for the signature of cosmic inflation—the rapid expansion of the early universe after the Big Bang. The project is one of just four cosmology proposals—out of more than 40 applicants in 2014—to be funded by the NSF.
Leading computational biologist Jill P. Mesirov, PhD, has been appointed associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences and professor of medicine at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. Mesirov most recently served as associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program.
Physicists have found a way to control the length and strength of waves of atomic motion that have promising potential uses such as fine-scale imaging and the transmission of information within tight spaces.
UC San Diego’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry ranked second in the nation in a new survey of professorships held by underrepresented minorities, reflecting the progress we’ve made in building a diverse faculty.
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