New fish-tagging studies of young bluefin tuna in the Atlantic off New England are offering the first fishery-independent, year-round data on dispersal patterns and habitat use for the popular game fish. Miniaturized pop-up satellite tags suitable for smaller fish helped make the research possible.
A new study confirms that though born with equal abilities to tell other-race people apart, by age 9 months infants are better at recognizing faces and emotional expressions of same-race people and the ability to distinguish other-race faces and match emotional sounds with expressions declines.
A team of chemical engineers led by Paul J. Dauenhauer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered a new, high-yield method of making the key ingredient used to make plastic bottles from biomass. The process currently creates the chemical p-xylene with an efficient yield of 75-percent.
Kinesiology researchers will study how the average 100-lb. load, sometimes heavier, carried by soldiers affects survivability, likelihood of injury and mission ability. It will for the first time look at how the upper body, trunk and head coordinate in a soldier burdened by a heavy load.
Biostatisticians developed a new tool to address one of the big problems slowing progress toward universal access to antiretroviral therapy for AIDS in developing nations. It helps to prioritize laboratory-based CD-4 cell count testing and allocate resources to the patients who need them the most.
Market researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say a new, younger “entitlement” generational cohort is emerging from the group known as the Millennials. The change is coming in response to cataclysmic events, especially the Great Recession, that have occurred since 2008.
In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto and colleagues propose a new mechanism, changes in the Earth’s tilt and orbit, to explain the source of carbon that fed extreme warming events about 55 million years ago and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward.
The U.S. National Research Council has released a synthesis of reports from thousands of scientists in 60 countries who took part in the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-08, the first in over 50 years to offer a benchmark for environmental conditions and new discoveries in the polar regions.
Perhaps no other biochemist in the world has his own baseball card, but Elih Velázquez-Delgado, who gave up pro ball for science, does. The doctoral student is about to publish his first academic paper on caspase-6, an enzyme that’s causally involved in Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.
Computer scientists still quest after a machine as adaptable as the human brain. Neural network expert Hava Siegelmann is translating early computational forms into an adaptable system that learns, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than a classic computer.
Combining known factors in a new way, physicists have solved an intractable 50-year-old problem: How to simulate strongly interacting quantum systems to accurately predict their properties. It could lead to superconductor applications and solving high-energy physics and ultra-cold atoms problems.
Inspired by nature’s way of shaping a petal, and building on simple techniques from photolithography and printing, researchers have developed a new photo-patterning tool for making three-dimensional shapes easily and cheaply. It should aid advances in biomedicine, robotics and tunable micro-optics.
Biologists have long been amazed by gecko feet, which allow 5-ounce lizards to produce an adhesive force equivalent to carrying 9 lbs. up a wall without slipping. Now, a team of polymer scientists and a biologist have invented “Geckskin,” an adhesive device that can hold 700 pounds on a smooth wall.
A team of chemical engineers at UMass Amherst has discovered a small molecule that behaves like cellulose when converted to biofuel. Studying this ‘mini-cellulose’ molecule reveals the chemical reactions that take place in wood and prairie grasses during high-temperature conversion to biofuel.
A reliable, low-cost animal model can greatly enhance success in identifying disease mechanisms and genetic pathways, and cut years off drug testing and treatment strategies. Neuroscientist Gerald Downes’s team has developed a new mutant zebrafish model to study human Maple Syrup Urine Disease.
Advances in studying genes mean that scientists in evolutionary developmental biology or “evo-devo” can now explain more clearly than ever before how bats got wings, the turtle got its shell and blind cave fish lost their eyes, says evolutionary biologist Craig Albertson, who studies cichlid fishes.
There will always be a wild, unpredictable quality to creativity and invention, says cognitive psychology researcher Anthony McCaffrey, because reaching an “Aha moment” means leaping tall mental obstacles. But he has developed a tookit for overcoming common roadblocks and improving problem-solving.
Aquaculture researcher Andy Danylchuk and colleagues are melding building design, fish ecology and aquaculture engineering techniques into a first-of-its-kind “building-integrated aquaculture” (BIAq) model to offer an affordable, more holistic and sustainable approach to indoor fish production.
Fish biologists conducted one of the first studies of deep-sea fish sounds in more than 50 years, 2,237 feet under the Atlantic. With recording technology more affordable, fish sounds can be studied to test the idea that fish communicate with sound, especially those in the dark of the deep ocean.
A team of resource economist researchers has revised the cost burden sharply upward for childhood asthma and for the first time include the number of cases attributable to air pollution, in a study released this week in the early online version of the European Respiratory Journal.
Geoscientists published the first evidence that warm-cold climate oscillations well known in the Northern Hemisphere over the most recent glacial period also appear as tropical rainfall variations in the Amazon Basin. It is the first clear expression of these cycles in the Southern Hemisphere.
A first-of-its-kind study suggests that emotional response after witnessing an unsettling picture or traumatic event is greatly reduced by staying awake afterward, and sleep strongly “protects” a negative emotional response. This could have provided survival value to our ancestors, the authors say.
A team of polymer scientists and engineers has discovered how to make nano-scale repairs to a damaged surface equivalent to spot-filling a scratched car fender rather than re-surfacing the entire part. Their discovery is reported this week in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.
Chemical engineers at UMass Amherst, using a catalytic fast pyrolysis process that transforms renewable non-food biomass into petrochemicals, have developed a new catalyst that boosts the yield for five key “building blocks of the chemical industry” by 40 percent compared to previous methods.
The producers say “Fish Meat” will soon be available for academic purchase and they hope it will also be picked up by a national media or cable network for presentation to general audiences.
A new analysis suggests that climate change in the U.S. will boost demand for imported drought- and heat-tolerant landscape plants from Africa and the Middle East, greatly increasing the risk that a new wave of invasives will overrun native ecosystems in the way kudzu and purple loosestrife have.
Biochemists have discovered a key interaction that could lead to a new treatment for a rare metabolic disorder, Fabry disease. It should aid understanding of other protein-folding diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well. Findings are the cover story in the current Chemistry & Biology.
Study suggests that exercise and one of the most commonly prescribed drugs for diabetes, metformin, each improves insulin resistance when used alone, but together, metformin blunted the full effect of a 12-week exercise program in pre-diabetic men and women.
Regulators have failed to address serious data gaps and untested assumptions guiding exposure limits to Cesium (Cs)-137 released in the Chernobyl accident in 1986 and the Fukushima incident, says toxicologist Edward Calabrese, and time to move toward adopting more evidence-based risk assessment.
A new, high-precision spectrograph orbiting Earth aboard the Hubble Space Telescope is sending such rich data to Earth, some astronomers feel they’ve crossed the final frontier in understanding galaxy evolution, the birthplaces of stars. Until now, most of the mass in a galaxy was undetectable.
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers find that communication using instant messaging and e-mail increases lying compared to face-to-face talk, and e-mail messages are most likely to contain lies. The findings are published in the October issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
In this 100th anniversary year of the discovery of superconductivity, physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology have published a fully self-consistent theory of the new kind of superconducting behavior, Type 1.5, this month in the journal Physical Review B.
Using one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors on the planet, physicists are now measuring the flow of solar neutrinos reaching Earth more precisely than ever before. It probes matter at the most fundamental level to provide a powerful tool for directly observing the sun’s composition.
New research based on post-hospital arrival data from U.S. trauma centers finds that even after adjusting for differences in injury severity, gun use, and other likely causes of race difference in death from assault, African-Americans have a significantly higher overall post-scene of injury mortality rate than whites.
Scientists have for the first time designed a simpler method of making ordered magnetic materials by coupling magnetic properties to nanostructure formation at low temperatures. Previous processes required either much higher temperatures or more steps to achieve the same result at higher cost.
Results of a new study at the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggest that people in midlife who are at genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease might show subtle differences in the speed at which they process information compared to those who do not have particular genetic risk.
A six-year campaign to control winter moth pests with a natural parasite now has concrete evidence that a fly, Cyzenis albicans, is attacking the pest at four sites in eastern Massachusetts. It’s the beginning of the end for the decade-long defoliation of millions of trees by the invasive species.
The discovery of a fundamental, previously unknown property of microbial nanowires in the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens allowing electron transport across long distances could revolutionize nanotechnology and bioelectronics, say UMass physicists and microbiologists in Nature Nanotechnology.
New, direct evidence from neuroscience research shows that estrogens are produced in the brain’s nerve cell terminals on demand, quickly and precisely where needed. Studies in zebra finches solidify a new role for estrogens in the brain, much more like a classic neurotransmitter than a hormone.
Long before they can speak, infants hear words that greatly shape their development. An experiment found that infants who heard objects referred to by individual names showed a pattern of brain activity suggestive of holistic processing while infants who learned generic labels for objects did not.
Among science’s “final frontiers,” one of the most difficult to cross has been looking into the workings of living cells. Now, a UMass Amherst physicist has built an instrument that sees and photographs single molecules in real time, to uncover such secrets as how enzymes regulate cell functions.
In the first analysis of how warning coloration evolved in carnivores, researchers explain why some species use bold coloration to warn predators that they risk being sprayed with stinky gas or getting into a vicious fight, while others do not. Results are in the current online issue of Evolution.
Recent sleep research has focused on memory, but results of a new study suggest another key effect of sleep is enhancing complex cognitive skills such as decision-making. One of the first studies of its kind supports the adage that “sleeping on it” is good advice when facing an important decision.
Bonefish are among the most sought-after sport fish in the world, but until recently scientists knew little about their spawning habits. Now, they’ve discovered more by tagging and tracking bonefish movements in the Bahamas. Results appear in an early online issue of the journal Marine Biology.
In basic research with far-reaching impact, cell biologists Wei-Lih Lee and Steven Markus report in Developmental Cell that they have solved one of the fundamental questions in stem cell division: How dynein, the cell’s nano-scale “mitotic motor,” positions itself to direct the dividing process.
Shelly Peyton, a chemical engineer at UMass Amherst, is building working models of human bone, breast, liver and artery tissues to see how cells behave when they are affected by a disease such as cancer. The goal is to develop new drug therapies to fight diseases that may not require animal testing.
Imagine hearing daily about health- and labor-saving devices in nearby towns, but having no way to reach them. A map would help, as a new “Nanoinformatics 2020 Roadmap” should enhance connections among nanotechnology science and engineering researchers, manufacturers and government agencies.
Organic chemists and materials scientists have long used microwaves to activate materials and break chemical bonds, but have not understood their special heating properties. Now an international research team has a new molecular-level probe to track how components in a mix absorb energy differently.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst today opened its new $5.6 million, state-of-the-art Clydesdale Center for Foods for Health & Wellness, with support from top leaders in the food industry and alumni. The center features new and renovated chemistry, microbiology and biology laboratory space for research in developing healthier and safer foods.
As rice farmers across the southern U.S. prepare to plant their crop this month, evolutionary geneticist Ana Caicedo and others have begun a major new study of how weeds evolve in general and of invasive weedy rice in particular, a prime threat to a staple that feeds millions worldwide every year.
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