Blog

An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by University of Delaware professors Wei-Jun Cai and Mark Warner has successfully measured both pH and carbonate ion concentration directly inside the calcifying fluid found in coral, an important development in the study of how ocean acidification will affect marine calcifying organisms such as corals and shellfish.

James Umen, Ph.D., associate member at Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and colleagues have discovered a protein that enables the single-celled green alga Chlamydomonas to count cell divisions, a process that is critically important for its cells to maintain optimal size. The findings were published March 25, in a paper titled, “A new class of cyclin dependent kinase in Chlamydomonas is required for coupling cell size to cell division,” in the open access journal eLife

A new dataset from researchers at Rice University and the University of California-Berkeley will allow international relations scholars to study the extent to which different types of foreign-policy change are associated with different types of leader transitions within countries.

Ideally, homeowners want to be warned if a burglar sneaks onto their property, and farmers want to know if horses or sheep are no longer in the paddock or field they were left grazing in. Experimental physicists at Saarland University have developed a flexible security solution that can be used in gardens, driveways, business premises, or on grazing land and in woodland

Astronomers using an orbiting radio telescope in conjunction with four ground-based radio telescopes have achieved the highest resolution, or ability to discern fine detail, of any astronomical observation ever made. Their achievement produced a pair of scientific surprises that promise to advance the understanding of quasars, supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies.

In 1665 Christiaan Huygens discovered that two pendulum clocks, hung from the same wooden structure, will always oscillate in synchronicity. Today, some 350 years on, Eindhoven and Mexican researchers present the most accurate and detailed description of this ‘Huygens synchronization’ to date in the journal Scientific Reports

A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has discovered two enzymes that appear to play a role in metabolism and inflammation—and might someday be targeted with drugs to treat type 2 diabetes and inflammatory disorders.

According to epigenetics—the study of inheritable changes in gene expression not directly coded in our DNA—our life experiences may be passed on to our children and our children’s children. Studies on survivors of traumatic events have suggested that exposure to stress may indeed have lasting effects on subsequent generations

A novel investigation of how enzymatic reactions can direct the motion and organization of microcapsules may point toward a new theory of how protocells – the earliest biological cells – could have organized into colonies and thus, could have ultimately formed larger, differentiated structures.

Research from North Carolina State University finds that “multimodal” communication – using a mix of words, images and other resources – is important for students and faculty in higher education, a finding that argues for increased instruction in multimodal communication for undergraduates.