Science

Eighteen gifted and talented high school students are spending the week on the Vanderbilt campus learning how nanoscience – the science of the very small – is impacting everything from the formulation of concrete to drug delivery systems. The nanoscience camp is one of a number of different camps being… Read More

Immortality and uncontrolled cell division are the fundamental differences between cancer cells and normal cells. Read More

Although Robert Scherrer, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, is a highly regarded cosmologist and an award-winning teacher, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) has selected him as the 2010 recipient of its Klopsteg Memorial Award based on his work as a published science fiction writer. Read More

Vanderbilt Professor of Physics Paul Sheldon heads a multi-institutional team that has received an Internet2 award for a networking system that they have developed to make it easier to move and store mountains of digital data. Read More

Vanderbilt physicist Joe Hamilton played a key role in the discovery of element 117, a new super-heavy element that has been created and identified by an international scientific team. Discovery of the new element provides new information about the basic organization of matter and strengthens the likelihood that still more massive elements may form an "island of stability": a cluster of stable super-heavy elements that could form novel materials with exotic and as yet unimagined scientific and practical applications. Read More

C. Robert O'Dell, Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt, will deliver the lecture "What Blew Up on the Fourth of July in 1054? The Crab Nebula of Course" on Tuesday, April 13, at 7 p.m. at the Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory. Read More

On Tuesday, March 30, Vanderbilt's high-energy physicists are opening a virtual control room that will allow them to participate fully in the experiments that will be conducted on the world's largest particle accelerator, the $9 billion Large Hadron Collider located in Switzerland. The LHC is beginning its research program on Tuesday and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which operates the machine, has invited the world's science press to cover the event. Read More

Vanderbilt's Dyer Observatory is free and open to the public March through November during monthly Open House Telescope Nights and Open House Days. Read More

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain's reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals. Read More

Identification of students with unrealized potential, continuous tracking of individual performance and intensive, one-on-one mentoring are key factors in successfully recruiting underrepresented minorities and women into the critical professions of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Read More

When cells move about in the body, they follow a complex pattern similar to that which amoebae and bacteria use when searching for food, a team of Vanderbilt researchers have found. Read More

Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises. Read More

Futurity.org, an online university news channel targeted to members of the public interested in basic research, has expanded beyond its North American base to include science news from leading British universities. Read More

David Jewitt, professor, astronomer and comet expert will give a free, public talk at Vanderbilt University about “Primordial Ice Reservoirs of the Solar System” and how much we know, and don't know, about them. Read More

Physicist Andreas Berlind and human geneticist Marylyn Ritchie at Vanderbilt University have each won two-year, $50,000 research fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation aimed at encouraging promising young scholars. Read More

Three Vanderbilt physicists are members of the scientific team that have reported creating an exotic state of matter with a temperature of four trillion degrees Celsius. It's the hottest temperature ever achieved in a laboratory and 250,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun. Read More

The unexpected discovery of a new type of genetic variation suggests that natural selection – the force that drives evolution – is both more powerful and more complex than scientists have thought. Read More

Scientists at Vanderbilt and Yale universities have successfully transplanted most of the "nose" of the mosquito that spreads malaria into frog eggs and fruit flies and are employing these surrogates to combat the spread of the deadly and debilitating disease that afflicts 500 million people. Read More

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the Department of Biological Sciences and the Law School at Vanderbilt University are jointly sponsoring a panel discussion about the famous naturalist's life and research. Read More

Seth Bordenstein, assistant professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, is studying the relationship between this parasitic bacteria and Nasonia, a genus of small wasps that prey on various species of flies, including houseflies, blowflies and flesh flies. Read More