New approach developed by UCLA’s Seulgi Moon
Each year, landslides kill thousands of people around the world and cause catastrophic property damage. But scientists are still trying to better understand the circumstances that cause them. Doing so would go a long way toward helping people predict where landslides could occur and how severe they might be. (more…)
Researchers at the University of Exeter and University College London (UCL) have identified a gene which can be used to predict how susceptible a young person is to the mind-altering effects of smoking cannabis. The finding could help identify otherwise healthy users who are most at risk of developing psychosis. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — HIV-infected people carry many different HIV viruses and all have distinct personalities—some much more vengeful and infectious than others.
Yet, despite the breadth of infectivity, roughly 76 percent of HIV infections arise from a single virus. Now, scientists believe they can identify the culprit with very specific measurements of the quantities of a key protein in the HIV virus. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — In the weeks after the Connecticut school shooting, as the nation puzzled over how it happened and what might prevent it from happening again, Kamal Sarabandi was listening to the news. Talk turned to giving teachers guns, and he paused.
“I said, there must be a better way,” Sarabandi recalled. (more…)
UD alumnus one of Popular Science magazine’s ‘Brilliant 10’ Young Scientists
University of Delaware alumnus Deva Ramanan has been named one of Popular Science magazine’s “Brilliant 10” Young Scientists.
The designation places Ramanan on the magazine’s annual “honor roll” of the 10 most promising scientist for 2012.
Ramanan, who earned his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at UD in 2000, is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California Irvine (UCI). There he is working to improve a computer’s image recognition capability, or in simpler terms, a computer’s ability to “see people.” (more…)
The public is invited to help identify objects they see in images of the seafloor through a new interactive website called “Seafloor Explorer.” The result of a unique collaboration between oceanographers studying seafloor habitats, Web programmers and social scientists, Seafloor Explorer (www.seafloorexplorer.org) launches September 13.
The team has more than 40 million images, but are launching the site with a preliminary set of 100,000 – all of them taken by HabCam, a habitat mapping underwater vehicle. HabCam was developed and built by the HabCam group, which comprises marine biologists and engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) as well as fishermen and other scientists. The Seafloor Explorer interactive website was funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and built in collaboration with the HabCam Group by the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA), the developers behind interactive sites found on Zooniverse.org. (more…)
