Tag Archives: university of hawaii at manoa

Scientists Develop Technology Revolutionizing Single-Cell Studies

Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, in collaboration with scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute, have made a significant breakthrough in developing a novel technology to investigate global gene-expression in a single bacterium. The team, led by Associate Professors Tung T. Hoang and Stuart P. Donachie, recently published a paper describing the technology in Genome Research (21:925-935), a premier international genome journal. UH Mānoa postdoctoral researcher Dr. Yun Kang, who performed this research in a Snyder Hall laboratory, contributed significantly and worked diligently to overcome the numerous technical challenges presented. (more…)

Read More

Geologist Finds Fiery Volcano Offers Glimpse into Land That Time Forgot

University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa geologist Kenneth Rubin is among the first scientists to witness exploding rock and molten lava from a deep sea volcano, seen during a 2009 expedition. He is co-author of a paper reporting that the eruption was near a tear in the Earth’s crust that is mimicking the birth of a subduction zone.

Scientists on the expedition collected boninite, a rare, chemically distinct lava that accompanies the formation of Earth’s subduction zones. (more…)

Read More

Scientists Project Changes in Rainfall Patterns for Next 30 Years

Scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have projected an increased frequency of heavy rainfall events, but a decrease in rainfall intensity during the next 30 years (20112040) for the southern shoreline of Oʻahu, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Chase Norton, a Meteorology Research Assistant at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH Mānoa, and colleagues (Professors Pao-Shin Chu and Thomas Schroeder) used a statistical model; rainfall data from rainfall gauges on Oahu, Hawaiʻi; and a suite of General Circulation Models (GCMs) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to project future patterns of heavy rainfall events on Oʻahu. GCMs play a pivotal role in the understanding of climate change and associated local changes in weather. (more…)

Read More

Researcher Discovers Mitochondria Share an Ancestor with SAR11

Billions of years ago, an astounding evolutionary event occurred: certain bacteria became obliged to live inside other cells, thus starting a chain of events that resulted in what is now the mitochondria, an organelle found in all eukaryotic cells.  A recent study by researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Oregon State University (OSU) provides strong evidence that mitochondria share a common evolutionary ancestor with a lineage of marine bacteria known as SAR11, arguably the most abundant group of microorganisms on Earth.

“This is a very exciting discovery,” said Michael Rappe, Associate Researcher at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH Mānoa.  “The results that we present make sense in a lot of ways: the physiology of SAR11 makes them more apt to be dependent on other organisms, and based on the contemporary abundance of SAR11 in the global ocean, the ancestral lineage may have also been abundant in the ancient ocean, increasing encounters between this bacterial lineage with the host of the original symbiosis event.” (more…)

Read More

Pan-STARRS Telescope Spots New Distant Comet

Astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have discovered a new comet that they expect will be visible to the naked eye in early 2013.

Originally found by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Maui, on the night of June 5-6, it was confirmed to be a comet by UH Mānoa astronomer Richard Wainscoat and graduate student Marco Micheli the following night using the Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope on Mauna Kea. (more…)

Read More

Scientists Discover a New Tiger Shark Hunting Technique

In a joint research effort between the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), University of Tokyo, the Japanese National Institute of Polar Research, and the University of Florida, scientists have shed new light on the hunting behavior of tiger sharks by studying their swimming dynamics off the west coast of Hawai‘i Island. (more…)

Read More

Coral Algae Discovered in Black Corals at Never Before Seen Depths

Hawaiian Black Coral. Image credit: Daniel Wagner, HIMB

Researchers at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB), an organized research unit in the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology have made a remarkable new discovery.

When most people envision coral, they typically think of shallow-water reef-building corals found along beaches and tropical nearshore habitats. These “typical” corals are dependent upon photosynthetic algae (also known as Symbiodinium or zooxanthellae) found in their tissues to obtain nutrients to live off of.

In deeper less known waters, closely related black corals were considered to be void of these algae because of the light shortage to support photosynthesis. In fact, all black corals were considered to lack Symbiodinium (algae), because they are typically found at great depths where light levels are very low. (more…)

Read More

The Long-Term Fate of the Oil Spill in the Atlantic

Honolulu, HI – The possible spread of the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig over the course of one year was studied in a series of computer simulations by a team of researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

(more…)

Read More