Leslie Rosenberg and his colleagues are about to go hunting. Their quarry: A theorized-but-never-seen elementary particle called an axion.
The search will be conducted with a recently retooled, extremely sensitive detector that is currently in a testing and shakeout phase at the University of Washington’s Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics. (more…)
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating devices out of a water-based hydrogel material that can be patterned, folded and used to manipulate objects. The technique holds promise for use in “soft robotics” and biomedical applications.
“This work brings us one step closer to developing new soft robotics technologies that mimic biological systems and can work in aqueous environments,” says Dr. Michael Dickey, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. (more…)
Behind the dazzling variety of shapes and forms found in trees hides a remarkably similar architecture based on fundamental, shared principles, UA ecologists have discovered.
Researchers in the University of Arizona’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology have found that despite differences in appearance, trees across species share remarkably similar architecture and can tell scientists a lot about an entire forest.
Just by looking at a tree’s branching pattern, it turns out, scientists can gather clues about how it functions – for example how much carbon dioxide it exchanges with the atmosphere or how much water transpires through its leaves – regardless of the tree’s shape or species. (more…)
The history of women with HIV/AIDS in the United States is really a story of racial and ethnic health disparities.
Overall, the rate of American women contracting the disease relative to men has climbed from 8 percent in the 1980s to 25 percent today. But most of this burden is in underserved communities: one in 32 African-American women will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime, as will one in 106 Latina women. Meanwhile, one in 526 Caucasian and Asian women will contract the virus. Death rates are also higher for African-American and Latina women, making it one of the leading causes of death for those groups. (more…)
UA physicist Andrei Lebed has stirred the physics community with an intriguing idea yet to be tested experimentally: The world’s most iconic equation, Albert Einstein’s E=mc2, may be correct or not depending on where you are in space.
With the first explosions of atomic bombs, the world became witness to one of the most important and consequential principles in physics: Energy and mass, fundamentally speaking, are the same thing and can, in fact, be converted into each other.
This was first demonstrated by Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity and famously expressed in his iconic equation, E=mc2, where E stands for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light (squared). (more…)
University of Missouri’s Sergei Kopeikin may have solved the Pioneer anomaly
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Former President Bill Clinton recently expressed his support for interstellar travel at the 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating for human expansion into other star systems. Interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission. The knowledge of those factors may be improved by the solution a University of Missouri researcher found to a puzzle that has stumped astrophysicists for decades.
“The Pioneer spacecraft, two probes launched into space in the early 70s, seemed to violate the Newtonian law of gravity by decelerating anomalously as they traveled, but there was nothing in physics to explain why this happened,” said Sergei Kopeikin, professor of physics and astronomy in MU’s College of Arts and Science. “My study suggests that this so-called Pioneer anomaly was not anything strange. The confusion can be explained by the effect of the expansion of the universe on the movement of photons that make up light and radio waves.” (more…)
Researchers at the UH Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) made a discovery that challenges a major theory in the field of coral reef ecology.
The general assumption has been that the more flexible corals are, regarding which species of single-celled algae (Symbiodinium) they host in coral tissues, the greater ability corals will have to survive environmental stress. In their paper published August 29, 2012, however, scientists at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) at SOEST and colleagues documented that the more flexible corals are, the more sensitive to environment disturbances they are. (more…)
AUSTIN, Texas — A team of astronomers led by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin has confirmed the emission of gravitational waves from the second-strongest known source in our galaxy by studying the shrinking orbital period of a unique pair of burnt-out stars. Their observations tested Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity in a new regime. The results will be published soon in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Last year, the same team discovered that the two white dwarf stars are so close together that they make a complete orbit in less than 13 minutes, and they should be gradually slipping closer. The system, called SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (J0651 for short), contains two white dwarf stars, which are the remnant cores of stars like our sun. (more…)
