NSF News From the Field

Mimicking Nature, Scientists Can Now Extend Redox Potentials

Researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have gained new insight into how nature handles oxidation-reduction reactions. This breakthrough, published tomorrow in the journal Nature, could lead to the design of tailor-made proteins for applications such as artificial photosynthetic centers, long-range electron transfers and fuel-cell catalysts for energy conversion.

Full story at http://news.illinois.edu/news/09/1104proteins.html

Source
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Longer Toes, Unique Ankle Structure Aid Sprinters

Longer toes and a unique ankle structure provide sprinters with the burst of acceleration that separates them from other runners, according to biomechanists.

Full story at http://live.psu.edu/story/42668

Source
Penn State

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

High-precision Measurements Confirm Cosmologists' Standard View of Universe

A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team of researchers. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation provide further support for the standard cosmological model, confirming that dark matter and dark energy make up 95 percent of everything in existence, while ordinary matter makes up just 5 percent.

Full story at http://home.slac.stanford.edu/pressreleases/2009/20091102b.htm

Source
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Robot Fish Could Monitor Water Quality

Nature inspires technology for an engineer and an ecologist teamed up at Michigan State University. They're developing robots that use advanced materials to swim like fish to probe underwater environments. Robotic fish--perhaps even schools of them, operating autonomously for months--could give researchers far more precise data.

Full story at http://news.msu.edu/story/7057/&keyword_search=Robot%20Fish%20Could%20Monitor%20Water%20Quality&keyword_action=all_words

Source
Michigan State University

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Wolves, Moose and Biodiversity: An Unexpected Connection

Moose eat plants; wolves kill moose. What difference does this classic predator-prey interaction make to biodiversity? A large and unexpected one, say wildlife biologists from Michigan Technological University, reporting in the November 2009 issue of the journal Ecology.

Full story at http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2009/november/story19659.html

Source
Michigan Technological University

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Inconspicuous Leaf Beetles Reveal Environment's Role in Formation of New Species

Unnoticed by the nearby residents of St. Johnsbury, Vt., tiny leaf beetles that flit among the maple and willow trees in the area have just provided some of the clearest evidence yet that environmental factors play a major role in the formation of new species.

Full story at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/stories/2beetles.html

Source
Vanderbilt University

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Inequality 'Silver Spoon' Effect Found in Ancient Societies

The so-called "silver spoon" effect--in which wealth is passed down from one generation to another--is well established in some of the world's most ancient economies, according to an international study coordinated by a University of California, Davis anthropologist. The study, to be reported in the Oct. 30 issue of Science, expands economists' conventional focus on material riches, and looks at various kinds of wealth.

Full story at http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=9291

Source
University of California, Davis

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

A New Wrinkle in Ancient Ocean Chemistry

A research team led by University of California, Riverside, geoscientists has corroborated evidence that oxygen production began in the Earth's oceans at least 100 million years before the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). The researchers analyzed 2.5 billion-year-old black shales, which revealed that episodes of hydrogen sulfide accumulation in the oxygen-free deep ocean occurred nearly 100 million years before the GOE.

Full story at http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=2200

Source
University of California, Riverside

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Blast From the Past Offers Clues About Early Universe

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have gained insight into the nature of the most distant object ever observed in the universe--a gigantic stellar explosion known as a gamma ray burst (GRB). The explosion was first detected on April 23, 2009 by NASA's Swift satellite, and scientists soon realized that it was more than 13 billion light-years from Earth.

Full story at http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2009/grbz8/

Source
National Radio Astronomy Laboratory (NRAO)

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

North Carolina Sea Levels Rising Three Times Faster Than in Previous 500 Years, Penn Study Says

An international team of environmental scientists has shown that sea-level rise in North Carolina is accelerating, a jump that appears to have occurred during a time of industrial change.

Full story at http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=1748

Source
University of Pennsylvania

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Trees Facilitate Wildfires as a Way to Protect Their Habitat

Fire is often thought of as something that trees should be protected from, but a new study suggests that some trees may themselves contribute to the likelihood of wildfires in order to promote their own abundance at the expense of their competitors. The study, which appears in the December 2009 issue of the journal The American Naturalist, says that positive feedback loops between fire and trees associated with savannas can make fires more likely in these ecosystems.

Full story at http://www.nimbios.org/press/wildfires

Source
National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS)

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Gossip in the Workplace: A Weapon or Gift, Says New Research From IU

Gossip in the workplace can be a weapon in reputational warfare or a gift, and can offer clues to power and influence not found on organizational charts. New research from Indiana University details how the weapon is wielded--and its influence muted--in a rare study that catches this national pastime on video. The study appears in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.

Full story at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/12357.html

Source
Indiana University

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Electrical Engineers Go Head to Head With Genius on Music Playlists

Electrical engineers recently pitted Genius--the music recommendation system in Apple's iTunes--against two experimental music recommender systems. Genius appears to capture acoustic similarities among songs within the same playlist, the researchers found. The University of California, San Diego, electrical engineers also discovered that the music recommender they built from scratch can generate song playlists that human subjects thought were as good as those that Genius generates.

Full story at http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/10-09Genius.asp

Source
University of California, San Diego

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

Snail Fossils Suggest Semiarid Eastern Canary Islands Were Wetter 50,000 Years Ago

Isotopic measurements, performed on fossilized land snail shells found in ancient soils on the subtropical eastern Canary Islands, resulted in oxygen isotope ratios that suggest the Spanish archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa has become progressively drier over the past 50,000 years. These findings are from research by Yurena Yanes and Crayton Yapp of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Full story at http://blog.smu.edu/research/2009/10/fossil_land_snail_shells_found.html

Source
Southern Methodist University

This is an NSF News From the Field item.

When Ants Attack: Researchers Recreate Chemicals That Trigger Aggression in Argentine Ants

Researchers have identified and synthesized the chemical cues by which Argentine ants distinguish colonymates from rivals. By exploiting these chemicals, researchers have demonstrated that normally friendly Argentine ants can turn against each other and fight.

Full story at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/10/27_ants.shtml

Source
University of California, Berkeley

This is an NSF News From the Field item.