Research News

Diamond tech could lead to low-cost medical imaging tools

More than 1,500 abandoned parcels of land lie scattered throughout San Francisco, from unused alleys to vacant parking lots and public easements. The combined area rivals the size of Golden Gate Park.  By integrating the potent tools of digital mapping with digital design technology used in architecture and engineering, Nicholas de Monchaux has created a new way to envision these many unused and underused sites together.

People who advocate adding insects to the human diet may be channeling their distant ancestors.

Alzheimer’s disease develops when proteins in the brain form abnormal tangles, and a key player is tau protein, which normally stabilizes the cytoskeleton of neurons.

Lin He’s lab uses CRISPR technology to study how different genetic elements in a mouse embryo’s cell nucleus – genes that encode proteins, functional RNAs, and repetitive sequences – interact to assure normal development or trigger cancer.

As North Korea’s president pledges to “denuclearize” the Korean peninsula, an international team of scientists is publishing the most detailed view yet of the site of the country’s latest and largest underground nuclear test on Sept. 3, 2017.

When the solar wind – which is really a driving rain of charged particles from the sun – strikes Earth’s protective magnetic field, the shock generates roiling, turbulent magnetic fields that enshroud the planet and stretch for hundreds of thousands of miles.

Jamie Cate is studying stains of yeast that can handle industrial conditions to create a new platform organism for new biofuels and a range of industrial chemicals.

What if we could edit the sensations we feel; paste in our brain pictures that we never saw, cut out unwanted pain or insert non-existent scents into memory?

Informing parents about not just when but how often their children miss school reduces absenteeism by 10 percent or more at every level from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

While neither telomerase-based anti-aging drugs, touted as a “fountain of youth,” nor anticancer drugs have yet appeared, the publication today of the first detailed picture of the molecular structure of human telomerase should jump-start that effort.

New technology being developed by engineers could dramatically improve the speed and accuracy of early breast cancer detection through the use of microfluidics.

Your cell phone can already find your car and tell you what song the restaurant is playing.  How about an app to screen for eye disease? By coupling the sophisticated imaging capabilities of smart phone cameras with lenses and software for examining the retina, Daniel Fletcher and his students have developed a hand-held, user-friendly version of the optometrist’s ophthalmoscope and are teaming up with clinical collaborators to detect retinal disease caused by diabetes. 

The critical role that breast feeding plays in infant survival may have led, during the last ice age, to a common genetic mutation in East Asians and Native Americans that also, surprisingly, affects the shape of their teeth.

Over hundreds if not thousands of years, however, a group of Southeast Asian “sea nomads” known for their deep-diving prowess has evolved a solution to increase their time underwater: larger spleens.

Researchers are using an exceptional stash of fossils found during the construction of a new East Bay dam to piece together a picture of what the Bay Area may have looked like some 15-20 million years ago.