By Wayne Lewis, UC Los Angeles | March 31, 2021 Glass, rubber and plastics all belong to a class of matter called amorphous solids. And in spite of how common they are in our everyday lives, amorphous solids have long posed a challenge to scientists. Since the 1910s, scientists have been able to map in 3D the atomic structures of crystals, the other major class of solids, ... Continue Reading »
Seagrasses turn back the clock on ocean acidification
By Kat Kerlin, UC Davis | March 31, 2021 Spanning six years and seven seagrass meadows along the California coast, a paper from the University of California, Davis, is the most extensive study yet of how seagrasses can buffer ocean acidification. The study, published today in the journal Global Change Biology, found that these unsung ecosystems can alleviate low pH, ... Continue Reading »
With drop in LA’s vehicular aerosol pollution, plants emerge as major source
Rober Sanders, UC Berkeley | March 23, 2021 California’s restrictions on vehicle emissions have been so effective that in at least one urban area, Los Angeles, the most concerning source of dangerous aerosol pollution may well be trees and other green plants, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, chemists. Aerosols — particles of hydrocarbons ... Continue Reading »
We’re surprisingly similar to Earth’s first animals, research says
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | March 18, 2021 The earliest multicellular organisms may have lacked heads, legs, or arms, but pieces of them remain inside of us today, new research shows. According to a UC Riverside study, 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures from the Ediacaran period share genes with today’s animals, including humans. “None of them had heads or ... Continue Reading »
Study unravels antibiotic resistance in MRSA ‘superbug’ infections
By Elaine Schmidt, UC Los Angeles | March 3, 2021 Researchers applied a new approach pioneered at UCLA to predict which methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, infections will fail to respond to antibiotic treatment. By focusing on epigenetics — changes to gene expression that can't be detected by standard DNA sequencing — the study examined how the immune ... Continue Reading »
Freshwater outflow from Beaufort Sea could alter global climate patterns
Nancy Ambrosiano, Los Alamos National Laboratory | February 24, 2021 The Beaufort Sea, the Arctic Ocean’s largest freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40 percent over the last two decades, putting global climate patterns at risk. A rapid release of this freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean could wreak havoc on the delicate climate balance that dictates ... Continue Reading »
Three-layered masks most effective against large respiratory droplets
Katherine Connor, UC San Diego | March 5, 2021 If you are going to buy a face mask to protect yourself and others from COVID-19, make sure it’s a three-layered mask. You might have already heard this recommendation, but researchers have now found an additional reason why three-layered masks are safer than single or double-layered alternatives. While this advice was ... Continue Reading »
Light unbound: Data limits could vanish with new optical antennas
Sarah Yang, UC Berkeley | February 25, 2021 Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small ... Continue Reading »
Doubling creation of antimatter using same laser energy
By Anne M. Stark, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | March 3, 2021 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have achieved a near-100 percent increase in the amount of antimatter created in the laboratory. Using targets with micro-structures on the laser interface, the team shot a high-intensity laser through them and saw a 100 percent increase in the ... Continue Reading »
‘Self-trained’ deep learning to improve disease diagnosis
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | March 4, 2021 Work by computer scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and IBM Research on deep learning models to accurately diagnose diseases from X-ray images with less labeled data won the Best Paper award for Computer-Aided Diagnosis at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference on Feb. 19. The technique, which ... Continue Reading »