Richard Ruiz, who heads the UA Department of Mexican American Studies, has turned to crossword puzzles to teach students about the implicit meaning of language.
Consider this crossword puzzle clue: The capital of Massachusetts? And know that while the answer contains six letters, it’s not Boston.
Give up? The answer: the U.S. “dollar.” (more…)
The Calaveras County Jumping Frog Jubilee has entered the scientific record via a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Experienced bullfrog ‘jockeys’ at the event routinely get their frogs to jump much farther than researchers had ever measured in the lab. How? Decades of refined technique, uncommonly motivated humans and herps, and good old-fashioned large sample size.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — One day, amid his decades-long study of how animals move, including how frogs jump, Brown University biologist Thomas Roberts found himself and colleague Richard Marsh puzzling over the Guinness Book of World Records. A bullfrog named Rosie the Ribiter reportedly had jumped more than 2.1 meters in a single hop at the Calaveras County Jumping Frog Jubilee in 1986, but scientific studies had never reported a bullfrog jump beyond 1.3 meters. (more…)
UD researcher gets to the root of why women leave STEM fields
Call it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Women who are the most invested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields (STEM) are also the ones who are most likely to leave them.
Part of it may have to do with a well-studied phenomenon called stereotype threat. But the University of Delaware’s Chad Forbes is trying to help change that. (more…)
UA Regents’ Professor Nicholas Strausfeld and an international team of researchers have discovered the earliest known complete nervous system exquisitely preserved in the fossilized remains of a never-before described creature that crawled or swam in the ocean 520 million years ago.
A team of researchers led by University of Arizona Regents’ Professor Nick Strausfeld and London Natural History Museum’s Greg Edgecombe have discovered the earliest known complete nervous system, exquisitely preserved in the fossilized remains of a never-before described creature that crawled or swam in the ocean 520 million years ago.
(more…)
For NASA and its dozens of missions, data pour in every day like rushing rivers. Spacecraft monitor everything from our home planet to faraway galaxies, beaming back images and information to Earth. All those digital records need to be stored, indexed and processed so that spacecraft engineers, scientists and people across the globe can use the data to understand Earth and the universe beyond.
At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., mission planners and software engineers are coming up with new strategies for managing the ever-increasing flow of such large and complex data streams, referred to in the information technology community as “big data.” (more…)
Project will utilize Ohio State’s new microscopy facility
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Armed with microscopes, computers and an innovative way to study metals, researchers at The Ohio State University and their partners are building a database of new titanium alloys.
The goal: to reduce the stress that pins, plates and other medical implants put on healthy bones. (more…)
Nearly 50 years of experiments and billions of dollars in equipment followed the prediction of the Higgs mechanism by theoretical physicists in 1964. Ulrich Heintz and Meenakshi Narain, two of the particle physicists at Brown University who worked on experiments at Fermilab and at CERN, note that the successful search for the Higgs was caried on by thousands of researchers.
The Nobel Prize awarded today to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs was a long time in the making. The Higgs mechanism was invented almost 50 years ago, and ever since the standard model emerged as the explanation of everything in particle physics that we have observed so far. The search for the Higgs boson was a quest that heated up for particle physics experimenters with every new facility that came online. Some of us (Heintz, Narain) looked for it in their thesis experiment at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring in the 1980s. Then the search moved to European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to the Large Electron Positron Collider, and back again to the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago, where we (Cutts, Heintz, Landsberg, Narain) were part of the discovery of the top quark in 1995 with the D-Zero experiment. (more…)
TORONTO, ON – Though it’s barely the beginning of autumn, scientists at the University of Toronto are one step closer to explaining why winter’s icicles form with Michelin Man-like ripples on their elongated shapes.
Experimental physicist Stephen Morris and PhD candidate Antony Szu-Han Chen were spurred to investigate by the ripples that appear around the circumference of icicles that occur naturally. It has been theorized that the ripples are the result of surface tension effects in the thin water film that flows over the ice as it forms. Their investigation revealed that the actual culprit is salt. (more…)
