Award-winning journalist, activist, and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault told a packed audience at Yale that lessons learned from the civil rights movement still have relevance for current and future generations.
Hunter-Gault delivered a lecture titled “Social Justice, Equity, and Public Health” during a Branford College master’s tea on Feb. 5. (more…)
Sensor gloves detect obstacles for firefighters in smoky rooms
University of Minnesota researchers have taken a step toward providing first responders with a new means of finding their way through dark or smoky buildings.
Lucy Dunne, an assistant professor in the College of Design’s Department of Design, Housing & Apparel, and graduate student Tony Carton, working with funding from the U’s Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station to augment the sensory awareness of first responders like firefighters, designed gloves that use ultrasonic sensors to detect walls and other objects. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — Traces of water have been detected within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions, according to a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues. (more…)
Arctic sea ice volume has declined by 36 per cent in the autumn and 9 per cent in the winter between 2003 and 2012, a UK-led team of scientists has discovered.
Researchers from the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at UCL used new data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite spanning 2010 to 2012, and data from NASA’s ICESat satellite from 2003 to 2008 to estimate the volume of sea ice in the Arctic. (more…)
Editors at Microsoft News Center recently spoke with Ron Van Zanten, vice president of Data Quality at Great Western Bank, to learn more about how big data solutions from Microsoft help his institution more easily attract and retain customers.
REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 14, 2013 —Remember 2008? It was the year the Great Recession descended, bringing the global economy to a near-standstill. The financial meltdown on Wall Street flowed through main streets around the globe, destroying many community banks in its path. In fact, according to the IMF, through 2010 the recession had already drained a whopping $3.4 trillion from financial institutions around the world.
Which makes Great Western Bank’s story truly amazing. As some institutions shuttered and shrank, Great Western reinvested – in its people, customers and in how it uses technology to make its business better. (more…)
The UA’s Chris Impey has taught cosmology to Tibetan Buddhist monastics in remote parts of India each summer for the past five years. With a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, he detailed his experiences in a book, “Humble Before the Void,” which likely will publish in 2014
Chris Impey thinks back to the time he spent living on the edge of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, teaching modern cosmology to Buddhist monastics in India: “On a typical day, they would be up at 5 a.m. and have prayed for a few hours or done meditation before you even see them. And their attention is just as good at the end of a long day as at the beginning.” (more…)
Territorial song sparrows use increasingly threatening signals to ward off trespassing rivals. First an early warning that matches the intruder’s song, then wing waving – a bird’s version of “flipping the bird” – as the dispute heats up, and finally, if all other signals have failed, attack.
This hierarchical warning scheme, discovered by researchers at the University of Washington, adds nuance to a communication system that has been long-used as a model to study how people use and learn language (more…)
Berkeley Lab Researchers Resolve EGFR Activation Mystery
Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have provided important new details into the activation of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a cell surface protein that has been strongly linked to a large number of cancers and is a major target of cancer therapies.
“The more we understand about EGFR and the complex molecular machinery involved in the growth and proliferation of cells, the closer we will be to developing new and more effective ways to cure and treat the many different forms of cancer,” says chemist Jay Groves, one of the leaders of this research. “Through a tour-de-force of quantitative biology techniques that included cutting edge time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy in living cells, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and computational modeling, we’ve determined definitively how EGFR becomes activated through to its epidermal growth factor (EGF) ligand.” (more…)
