University of Oregon
Previous research has found that children raised in homes without a biological father have sex earlier than children raised in traditional nuclear families. Now a new study that used a novel and complex design to investigate why this is so challenges a popular explanation of the reasons.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) -- -- Nanosized diamonds found just a few meters below the surface of Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Santa Barbara provide strong evidence of a cosmic impact event in North America approximately 12,900 years ago, according to a new study by scientists. Their hypothesis holds that fragments of a comet struck across North America at that time.
Young adolescents care a lot about what others think about them. A new study confirms this using brain-mapping techniques that shed new light on this complex period of social development.
The study, published in the July/August 2009 issue of the journal Child Development, is authored by researchers at the University of Oregon and the University of California Los Angeles.
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- A protein called neuroligin that is implicated in some forms of autism is critical to the construction of a working synapse, locking neurons together like "molecular Velcro," a study lead by a team of UC Davis researchers has found.
University of Oregon physicists have successfully landed a one-two punch on a tiny glass sphere, refrigerating it in liquid helium and then dosing its perimeter with a laser beam, to bring its naturally occurring mechanical vibrations to a near standstill.
The findings, published in Nature Physics, could boost advances in information processing that exploits special quantum properties and
People voluntarily pick what information they store in short-term memory. Now, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers can see just what information people are holding in memory based only on patterns of activity in the brain.
Scientists at the University of Oregon have discovered a form of blue-green algae that lives independently in California's Salton Sea, using near-infrared light for photosynthesis, according to an article published in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "This new strain of Acaryochloris is unique because it is able to live on its own," says UO biology professor Michelle Wood. She obtained samples containing the organism while studying the diversity of blue-green algae in the hypersaline lake as part of the comprehensive study of the Salton Sea coordinated by Professor Stuart Hurlbert, director of the Center for Inland Waters at San Diego State University.
Imagination is alive and thriving in the minds of America's school-age children. It is so prevalent that 65 percent of children report that, by the age of 7, they have had an imaginary companion at some point in their lives, according to a new study by University of Washington and University of Oregon psychologists. The research also indicates that having an imaginary companion is at least as common among school-age children as it is among preschoolers.
A trusted mental map of your surroundings turns out to be slightly misaligned, skewing your orientation. Your ability to control the direction in which you move is similarly compromised, although in a manner opposite the map's offset. Taken together, the errors cancel one another, and you end up exactly where you want to be. Contrary to the proverb, two wrongs do make a right.
In a nod to scientific paradox, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have slowed light down in an effort to speed up network communication. They have shown for the first time that the group velocity of light - the speed at which a laser pulse travels along a light wave - can be slowed to about 6 miles per second in semiconductors. While that speed is not exactly the pace of a turtle, it is 31,000 times slower than the 186,000 miles (or 300 million meters) per second that light normally clocks while traveling through a vacuum.
Up to 95 percent of a person's DNA is believed to be junk DNA. In order to prevent these relics of evolution from rearranging chromosomes and causing disease, natural mechanisms exist to silence them, according to contemporary theories of chromosome biology. The RNA silencing machinery silences gene expression, by destroying RNA, a molecule that carries out DNA's instructions. Two years ago, components of the RNA silencing machinery were shown to be absolutely required for forming heterochromatin, a chromatin state that silences DNA, suggesting a new rule in biology. But researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of Oregon disagree.
A bonanza of artifacts that may prove to be from the Donner family's camp is on its way to the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Eugene. A team of archaeologists led by UO and University of Montana researchers hit pay dirt earlier this week at Alder Creek Camp in the Truckee Ranger District of the Tahoe National Forest.
Another puzzle solved: Researchers are now able to control precisely the spacing between nanoparticles, a key advance in the genesis of a new class of nanoscale electronics and optics. ''We care about the spacing between the particles because the interactions between them are distance-dependent,'' said a lead scientist.. ''If they're too far apart, the interaction will be weaker, preventing the particles from passing electrons from one to another.''
