In a new study, men were more likely than women to endorse conspiracy theories connected to COVID-19. This important research will help debunk potentially dangerous falsehoods regarding the pandemic and enhance public health practices.
In two separate studies, the University of Delaware’s Kathryn Coyne is looking at why one species of algae has some strains that can cause fish kills and others that are non-toxic, while examining an algicidal bacterium found in Delaware’s Inland Bays that could provide an environmentally-friendly approach to combatting algae blooms.
Microbes found deeper in the ocean are believed to have slow population turnover rates and low amounts of available energy. But microbial communities found deeper in seafloor sediments and around hydrocarbon seepage sites have now been found to have more energy available and a higher population turnover. Deeper sediments in the seepages are most likely heavily impacted by the material coming up from the bottom, which means that the seep could be supporting a larger amount of biomass than previously thought.
It’s called CHARM—the University of Delaware’s new Center for Hybrid, Active and Responsive Materials. It will drive fundamental materials science research and enable critical innovations in biomedicine, security, sensing and more.
A team of UD engineers has uncovered the role of surface diffusion in protein transport, which could aid biopharmaceutical processing. This work will lead to the creation of new ways to reduce waste during the expensive drug manufacturing process, enabling more efficient ways of designing and developing manufacturing techniques.
Researchers have discovered that bacteria such as salmonella and E.coli have a backdoor to capitalize on our reliance on leafy greens for a healthy diet. Wild strains of salmonella are delivering foodborne illnesses by circumventing a plant’s immune defense system to get into the leaves of lettuce.
A new study from the University of Delaware finds that tropical forest loss is increased by large-scale land acquisitions and that certain kind investment projects—including tree plantations and plantations for producing palm oil and wood fiber—are “consistently associated with increased forest loss.”
Ice melts in the Arctic Ocean were thought to draw large amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, acting as a carbon sink and helping to mitigate greenhouse gases. But new research from the University of Delaware finds that may not be the case in all areas, particularly in the Canada Basin, where the melts are reducing the basin’s capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
While there was a bay-wide decline of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) from the 1960s through the 1980s, restoring these once-abundant SAV beds has been a primary outcome of efforts to reduce loads of nutrients and sediments to the estuary and SAV cover has increased by 300 percent from 1984 to 2015. One of the largest recovered SAV beds lies in an area of the bay known as the Susquehanna Flats—a broad, tidal freshwater region located near the mouth of the Susquehanna River at the head of the bay.
University of Delaware professor Wei-Jun Cai teamed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists, as well as professors and professionals from numerous research institutes, to conduct an in-depth study that looks at carbon dioxide uptake and ocean acidification in the coastal oceans of North America.
In order to identify materials that can improve storage technologies for fuel cells and batteries, you need to be able to visualize the actual three-dimensional structure of a particular material up close and in context. Researchers from the University of Delaware’s Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) have done just that, developing new techniques for characterizing complex materials.
Cements, clays, soils, inks, paints, and even toothpaste. Many paste materials, also known as dense colloidal suspensions, stiffen as they age. Structural dynamics, or changes in the loads the materials undergo over time, are partly responsible for this change, but for decades, experts have suspected that there’s more going on inside these materials. Now, a University of Delaware professor and an international team of researchers have discovered a process called contact-controlled aging that explains some age-related changes in paste materials.
Red blood cells sometimes rupture when blood is sent through faulty equipment, such as a dialysis machine. This is called hemolysis. Hemolysis also can occur during blood work when blood is drawn too quickly through a needle, leading to defective laboratory samples. University of Delaware mechanical engineer Tyler Van Buren and collaborating colleagues at Princeton University have developed a method to monitor blood damage in real-time.