Science

One of the best things the world can do to promote peace and stability in the coming century is to expand commercial nuclear power based on the extraction of uranium from the ocean. That is the proposition which Frank Parker, an internationally recognized expert in remediation of radioactively contaminated soil and water and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, advanced at an exclusive meeting held at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican last month. Read More

Vanderbilt University Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Kelly Holley-Bockelmann has been awarded the National Science Foundation's largest ever Faculty Early Career Development grant in the field of astronomy. She will use the prestigious award to continue her studies of black holes while supporting the university's innovative program designed to make the university the top producer of underrepresented minorities with Ph.D.s in physics and astronomy. Read More

Vanderbilt professors Jonathan Gilligan and Michael Vandenbergh are among researchers who have identified 17 activities that individual households can do to significantly reduce overall carbon emissions. The steps are explained in the recently published article "Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce U.S. carbon emissions." Read More

Figuring out how biological clocks evolved and extracting clues to environmental factors that cause cancer from electronic medical records: These are the goals of two projects that have been funded by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) program. Read More

Antonis Rokas is a member of a small cadre of scientists who are applying the growing power of genomics to untangle and correctly arrange the branches of the tree of life. Read More

"Bad movie physics from the perspective of art and science" is the subject of a free public lecture that is scheduled for 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15, in Stevenson Center Room 4327 on the Vanderbilt campus. Read More

The most ambitious attempt yet to trace the history of the universe has seen "first light." The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), took its first astronomical data on the night of Sept. 14-15 at the Sloan Foundation telescope in New Mexico. Read More

Concerned with the dramatic decline in the traditional media's coverage of newsworthy scientific and academic activities, Vanderbilt has joined with 34 other top research universities to create Futurity.org, an online news channel designed to showcase the achievements of their scientists and engineers, medical researchers and scholars. Read More

A unique collaboration between Fisk and Vanderbilt universities that is poised to become the nation's top source of Ph.D.s in physics and astronomy awarded to underrepresented minorities has received a major boost from three federal grants totaling $3.7 million. Read More

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Keivan G. Stassun has been awarded a $50,000 fellowship from the Fletcher Foundation to support his efforts to increase the number of underrepresented minorities pursuing scientific careers. Read More

Training increases brain processing speed and improves our ability to multitask, new research from Vanderbilt University published in the June 15 issue of Neuron indicates. Read More

A Vanderbilt chemist and a biomedical engineer have teamed up to develop a respiratory virus detector that is sensitive enough to detect an infection at an early stage, takes only a few minutes to return a result and is simple enough to be performed in a pediatrician's office. Read More

New research from Vanderbilt University indicates the way our brain handles how we move through space—including being able to imagine literally stepping into someone else's shoes—may be related to how and why we experience empathy toward others. Read More

Forget the old folk tales about snakes hypnotizing their prey. The tentacled snake from South East Asia has developed a more effective technique. The small water snake has found a way to startle its prey so that the fish turn toward the snake's head to flee instead of turning away. In addition, the fish's reaction is so predictable that the snake actually aims its strike at the position where the fish's head will be instead of tracking its movement. Read More

Our tendency to see people and faces as individuals may explain why we are such experts at recognizing them, new research indicates. This approach can be learned and applied to other objects as well. Read More

Jason Martin, a fellow in allergy, pulmonary and critical care medicine, is part of an interdisciplinary team at Vanderbilt University that has come up with a high-tech approach to combat this deadly illness, which is one of the top 10 causes of death in the United States and kills more than half a million people worldwide every year. Read More

Nanoparticle films are no longer a delicate matter: Vanderbilt physicists have found a way to make them strong enough so they don't disintegrate at the slightest touch. Read More

The Nazca Lines are an enigma. The strange geometric shapes and animals carved into the land were first spotted in the Peruvian desert south of Lima in the 1930s when commercial airlines began flying over them. Read More

Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today. Read More

A team of Vanderbilt engineers will play a key role in a new federal effort to significantly improve our understanding of how gases and liquids interact with solid surfaces – basic studies that have potential applications ranging from better batteries to more efficient methods for converting solar and electrical energy into fuel, improved fuel cells and enhancing the corrosion resistance of materials. Read More