Science

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

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