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Searching for the Solar System’s Chemical Recipe

Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Dynamics Beamline points to why isotope ratios in interplanetary dust and meteorites differ from Earth’s

By studying the origins of different isotope ratios among the elements that make up today’s smorgasbord of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and interplanetary ice and dust, Mark Thiemens and his colleagues hope to learn how our solar system evolved. Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, has worked on this problem for over three decades.

In recent years his team has found the Chemical Dynamics Beamline of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to be an invaluable tool for examining how photochemistry determines the basic ingredients in the solar system recipe. (more…)

Changes in Cloud Distribution Explain Some Weather Patterns

Environment

Regional cloud changes, such as those that result in less rain during monsoons in India and those that indicate a widening of the tropics, may be as important to watch as the overall amount of cloud cover, new University of Washington research indicates.

Authors of the paper, led by Ryan Eastman, a UW research scientist in atmospheric sciences, set out to examine observations collected from weather stations around the world as a way to study the distribution of clouds. The research was recently published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. (more…)

Wanted: A Life Outside the Workplace

General

A memo to employers: Just because your workers live alone doesn’t mean they don’t have lives beyond the office.

New research at Michigan State University suggests the growing number of workers who are single and without children have trouble finding the time or energy to participate in non-work interests, just like those with spouses and kids.

Workers struggling with work-life balance reported less satisfaction with their lives and jobs and more signs of anxiety and depression. (more…)

Volcanic Aerosols, not Pollutants, Tamped down Recent Earth Warming, Says CU Study

Environment

A team led by the University of Colorado Boulder looking for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as scientists expected between 2000 and 2010 now thinks the culprits are hiding in plain sight — dozens of volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide. (more…)

Global Education

Education

UD student helps provide children in Nigeria a schoolhouse of their own

In the Nigerian village of Ukya’u, the children have a teacher and sit on benches in a church room, but there are no desks, no separate classes and no school building to call their own.

Chelsea Rozanski, a University of Delaware sophomore who is majoring in anthropology with a minor in African Studies, is working to change that situation. (more…)

UCLA Researchers Further Refine ‘Nanovelcro’ Device to Grab Single Cancer Cells from Blood

Science

Improvement enables ‘liquid biopsies’ for metastatic melanoma

Researchers at UCLA report that they have refined a method they previously developed for capturing and analyzing cancer cells that break away from patients’ tumors and circulate in the blood. With the improvements to their device, which uses a Velcro-like nanoscale technology, they can now detect and isolate single cancer cells from patient blood samples for analysis.

Circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, play a crucial role in cancer metastasis, spreading from tumors to other parts of the body, where they form new tumors. When these cells are isolated from the blood early on, they can provide doctors with critical information about the type of cancer a patient has, the characteristics of the individual cancer and the potential progression of the disease. Doctors can also tell from these cells how to tailor a personalized treatment to a specific patient. (more…)

What Lies Beneath: NASA Antarctic Sub Goes Subglacial

Science

When researcher Alberto Behar from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., joined an international Antarctic expedition last month on a trek to investigate a subglacial lake, he brought with him a unique instrument designed and funded by NASA to help the researchers study one of the last unexplored aquatic environments on Earth. (more…)