Around 20 percent of all humans are persistently colonized with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, a leading cause of skin infections and one of the major sources of hospital-acquired infections, including the antibiotic-resistant strain MRSA.
University of Chicago scientists have recently discovered one of the keys to the immense success of S. aureus—the ability to hijack a primary human immune defense mechanism and use it to destroy white blood cells. The study was published Nov. 15 in Science. (more…)
Narrow stripes of dirt and rock beneath massive Antarctic glaciers create friction zones that slow the flow of ice toward the sea, researchers at Princeton University and the British Antarctic Survey have found. Understanding how these high-friction regions form and subside could help researchers understand how the flow of these glaciers responds to a warming climate.
Just as no-slip strips on flooring prevent people from slipping on a wet floor, these ribs or “tiger stripes” — named in reference to Princeton’s tiger mascot — provide friction that hinders the glaciers from slipping along the underlying bed of rock and sediment, the researchers report online in the journal Science. (more…)
Like urban bike-sharing programs everywhere, Chicago’s Divvy must contend with a key problem: due to commuting patterns, some bike stations empty out fast while others fill up quickly, leaving no space for more drop-offs.
But such urban problems can be addressed with socially minded computer science, as a group of 50 Chicago high school students learned recently during a daylong conference at the University of Chicago. (more…)
Robert J. Shiller, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, has been awarded a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He shares the award — formally, the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — with Eugene F. Fama and Lars Peter Hansen from the University of Chicago. According to the Nobel committee, the three were honored “for their empirical analysis of asset prices.”
Shiller, whose name became a household word with the wide use of the Case-Shiller Home Price real estate Index, came to national prominence with the publication in 2000 of “Irrational Exuberance.” The book, which quickly became a bestseller, described speculative bubbles fueled by mass misinformation and herd instinct, and accurately predicted the dot.com implosion. As early as 2003, Shiller warned of the housing market collapse, and later wrote a precept for recovery, “Subprime Solution: How the Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It.” (more…)
“The app challenge has contributed to the overall environment of innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the University,” said Klara Jelinkova, senior associate vice president and chief information technology officer. “With all the great ideas circulating around this campus, the app challenge has given people without technical training a chance to join a team and create an app with high value to the entire community.” (more…)
A multi-institutional team of engineers has developed a new approach to the fabrication of nanostructures for the semiconductor and magnetic storage industries. This approach combines top-down advanced ink-jet printing technology with a bottom-up approach that involves self-assembling block copolymers, a type of material that can spontaneously form ultrafine structures.
The team, consisting of nine researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago and Hanyang University in Korea, was able to increase the resolution of their intricate structure fabrication from approximately 200 nanometers to approximately 15 nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, the width of a double-stranded DNA molecule. (more…)
Physicists have reproduced a pattern resembling the cosmic microwave background radiation in a laboratory simulation of the Big Bang, using ultracold cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber at the University of Chicago.
“This is the first time an experiment like this has simulated the evolution of structure in the early universe,” said Cheng Chin, professor in physics. Chin and his associates reported their feat in the Aug. 1 edition of Science Express, and it will appear soon in the print edition of Science. (more…)
165 million-year-old omnivore may have had armadillo-like gait
“We finally have a glimpse of what may be the ancestral condition of all mammals, by looking at what is preserved in Megaconus. It allows us to piece together poorly understood details of the critical transition of modern mammals from pre-mammalian ancestors,” said Zhe-Xi Luo, professor of organismal biology and anatomy. (more…)
