University of California, Riverside
What's the secret to surviving during times of environmental change? Evolve -- quickly.
A new article in The American Naturalist finds that guppy populations introduced into new habitats developed new and advantageous traits in just a few years. This is one of only a few studies to look at adaptation and survival in a wild population.
Cigarette smoke, whether first- or second-hand, complicates the careful cellular choreography of wound healing, according to a paper by University of California, Riverside researchers. Cigarette smoke delays the formation of healing tissue and sets the stage for increased scarring at the edges of a wound according to the paper. Wound healing is a highly choreographed, biological drama of clotting, inflammation, cell proliferation and tissue remodeling. It features an exotic cast of clotting and growth factors, specialized cells and structural proteins, each of which must time their entrance and exit perfectly. Nothing messes up this timing like cigarette smoke.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have discovered the world's strongest acid. Remarkably it is also the gentlest acid. This non-toxic and non-corrosive acid may have a role in processes such as improving the quality of gasoline, developing polymers and synthesizing pharmaceuticals. So how can an acid be both strong and gentle? The answer lies in the way chemists define the strength of an acid.
Classic evolutionary theories of senescence, or the evolution of the rate at which organisms deteriorate as they age, have been challenged by the findings of researchers at the University of California, Riverside. In the 1950s, Peter Medawar, winner of a Nobel Prize for medicine, and George Williams, a renowned evolutionary biologist, developed theories for the evolution of senescence, which predicted that organisms that are exposed to high mortality imposed by external factors, like disease or predation, will evolve to deteriorate more rapidly as they get older. Their predictions have been widely accepted and are supported by some experiments. Now, a study by UC Riverside researchers comparing fish living in high- and low-predator environments has found that these classically held theories of aging fail to predict how aging has evolved in nature.
Researcher Mark Springer, a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside, is part of a team that has traced the origins of the shrew-like Caribbean creatures, known as solenodons, to the Mesozoic era, making them contemporaries with the dinosaurs.
A team of UC Riverside geologists can tell you more about earthquakes in "Middle Earth" than the whole trilogy of "The Lord of the Rings." Specifically, why do earthquakes happen at intermediate depth in the earth, when current wisdom suggests they should not? Three researchers at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Riverside ? Haemyeong Jung, Harry W. Green II and Larissa Dobrzhinetskaya ? think they have found part of the answer, and they have published a paper in this week's edition of the scientific journal Nature.
Scientists have found evidence of the release of an enormous quantity of methane gas as ice sheets melted at the end of a global ice age about 600 million years ago, possibly altering the ocean's chemistry, influencing oxygen levels in the ocean and atmosphere, and enhancing climate warming because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. The study was published in today's issue of the journal Nature.
Engineers have designed a new diode that transmits more electricity than any other device of its kind, and the inspiration for it came from technology that is 40 years old. Unlike other diodes in its class, called tunnel diodes, the new diode is compatible with silicon, so manufacturers could easily build it into mainstream electronic devices such as cell phones and computers.
Astronomers Steve Howell of the University of California, Riverside and Thomas E. Harrison and Heather Osborne of New Mexico State University have found from their observations of over a dozen mass-losing stars in 'cataclysmic variables' that most of the secondary stars do not appear to be normal main sequence stars in terms of their apparent abundances. To various degrees, each star seems to have low to no carbon and other odd mixtures of elements such as sodium and calcium, the astronomers announced today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Nashville, Tenn.
In a discovery that is likely to impact fields as diverse as atomic physics, chemistry and nanotechnology, researchers have identified a new physical phenomenon, electrostatic rotation, that, in the absence of friction, leads to spin. Because the electric force is one of the fundamental forces of nature, this leap forward in understanding may help reveal how the smallest building blocks in nature react to form solids, liquids and gases that constitute the material world around us.
