News Articles

Kevin Gardner sees green roads right around the corner.
“A lot of the infrastructure in this country needs to be re-built,” says Gardner, University of New Hampshire associate professor of civil engineering and director of the Environmental Research Group. “We have a real opportunity to re-build the infrastructure the right way with sustainable materials and socially sensitive designs that protect air, water, land, and human resources.”
Funded by the Federal Highway Administration and pooled state highway funds, as well as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants for specific research projects, Gardner established the new Recycled Materials Resource Management Center (RMRC) at UNH on June 1, 2007. The RRMC is a collaboration between UNH environmental and social impact researchers and University Wisconsin-Madison geotechnical, or soil behavior, faculty. Working closely with a board of advisors composed of representatives from the EPA, the Federal Highway Administration and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, as well as numerous other stakeholders, one of the Center’s activities is to establish a green roads program that develops criteria for what makes a roadway green.

A team of academic, industry and independent researchers has demonstrated a new class of computer attacks that compromise the contents of “secure” memory systems, particularly in laptops.
The attacks overcome a broad set of security measures called “disk encryption,” which are meant to secure information stored in a computer’s permanent memory. The researchers cracked several widely used technologies, including Microsoft’s BitLocker, Apple’s FileVault and Linux’s dm-crypt.
The team reports that these attacks are likely to be effective at cracking many other disk encryption systems because these technologies have architectural features in common.

Venus, it turns out, is a planet of extraordinarily changeable and extremely large-scale weather. Bright hazes appear in a matter of days, reaching from the south pole to the low southern latitudes and disappearing just as quickly. This kind of ‘global weather’, unlike anything on Earth, has given scientists a new mystery to solve.
The cloud-covered world of Venus is all but a featureless, unchangeable globe at visible wavelengths of light. Switch to the ultraviolet and it reveals a truly dynamic nature. Transient dark and bright markings stripe the planet, indicating regions where solar ultraviolet radiation is absorbed or reflected, respectively.
In July 2007, the Venus Monitoring Camera (VMC) captured a series of images showing the development of a bright southern haze.

The first direct evidence of how and when tectonic plates move, that collision with one sliding below the other into the rocky mantle, could potentially improve their ability to assess earthquake risks.
A team of researchers writing in Nature found that, contrary to common scientific predictions, dense plates tend to be held in the upper mantle, while younger and lighter plates sink more readily into the lower mantle.
The mantle is a zone underneath the Earth's crust encompassing its super hot molten core. It is divided into an upper and lower area, and is made up of a 2,900 km circumference of churning, viscous rock. It is constantly fed with new material from parts of tectonic plates which slide down from the surface into it.

A new way of looking at cities has emerged during the last 20 years that could revolutionise planning and ultimately benefit city dwellers.
‘The Size, Scale and Shape of Cities’ in Science advocates an integrated approach to the theory of how cities evolve by linking urban economics and transportation behaviour with developments in network science, allometric growth and fractal geometry.
Professor Batty argues that planning’s reliance on the imposition of idealised geometric plans upon cities is rooted in the nineteenth century attitude which viewed cities as chaotic, sprawling and dirty.

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have found a previously unknown molecular pathway in mice that spurs the growth of new blood vessels when body parts are jeopardized by poor circulation.
At present, their observation adds to the understanding of blood vessel formation. In the future, though, the researchers suggest it is possible that the pathway could be manipulated as a means of treating heart and blood vessel diseases and cancer.
Bruce Spiegelman, PhD, and his colleagues at Dana-Farber discovered that PGC-1alpha – a key metabolic regulatory molecule – senses a dangerously low level of oxygen and nutrients when circulation is cut off and then triggers the formation of new blood vessels to re-supply the oxygen-starved area – a process known as angiogenesis.

Deadly emerging diseases have risen steeply across the world and an international research team has provided the first scientific evidence mapping the outbreaks’ main sources.
They say:
New diseases originating from wild animals in poor nations are the greatest threat to humans and;
Expansion of humans into shrinking pockets of biodiversity and resulting contacts with wildlife are the reason.
Meanwhile, richer nations are nursing other outbreaks, including multidrug-resistant pathogen strains, through overuse of antibiotics, centralized food processing and other technologies.

Zoonotic pathogens passed from wildlife to people, from lowest occurrence (green) to highest (red).

University of Michigan scientists and their colleagues at the National Institute on Aging have produced the largest and most detailed worldwide study of human genetic variation, a treasure trove offering new insights into early migrations out of Africa and across the globe.
Like astronomers who build ever-larger telescopes to peer deeper into space, population geneticists like Noah Rosenberg are using the latest genetic tools to probe DNA molecules in unprecedented detail, uncovering new clues to humanity's origins.
The latest study characterizes more than 500,000 DNA markers in the human genome and examines variations across 29 populations on five continents.

A schematic of worldwide human genetic vari

A team of researchers has discovered the remains in Madagascar of what may be the largest frog ever to exist.
The 16-inch, 10-pound ancient frog, scientifically named Beelzebufo, or devil frog, links a group of frogs that lived 65 to 70 million years ago with frogs living today in South America.
Discovery of the voracious predatory fossil frog is significant in that it may provide direct evidence of a one-time land connection between Madagascar, the largest island off Africa's southeast coast, and South America.

Beelzebufo. This ain't your daddy's giant devil frog. Credit: SUNY-Stony Brook

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it isn’t necessarily the fastest or easiest path to follow.
That’s particularly true when terrain is not level, and now researchers have developed a mathematical model showing that a zigzag course provides the most efficient way for humans to go up or down steep slopes.

Human migration from Africa to Europe more than 30,000 years ago is still visible in the genes of Europeans today - and because the numbers were small, the harmful variations were magnified as time passed.
A study in the Feb. 21 issue of Nature compared more than 10,000 sequenced genes from 15 African-Americans and 20 European-Americans. The results suggest that European populations have proportionately more harmful variations, though it is unclear what effects these variations actually may have on the overall health of Europeans.
Computer simulations suggest that the first Europeans comprised small and less diverse populations. That would have allowed mildly harmful genetic variations within those populations to become more frequent over time, the researchers report.

You may not be aware of it - they might not be aware of it, but the people in your work environment might be slowing you down.
New research by University of Calgary, Faculty of Kinesiology researcher Dr. Tim Welsh says that regardless of their intentions, having an individual working on a different task - within your field of vision - could be enough to slow down your performance.
“Imagine a situation like a complex assembly line,” said Welsh If you are doing a particular task and the person across from you is doing a different task, you’ll be slowed down regardless of their performance.”