News Articles

UNSW space scientists have outshone NASA by scoring a higher academic paper citation rate, according to the latest international ranking of universities and space science institutions.
The Thomson group recently reported on the output of refereed journal articles and citations in Space Sciences from 2001 to 2005.
UNSW did extremely well with a very high citation rate (15.69) that was better than NASA (15.42) and within 20 percent of Caltech and Harvard – the world’s three top-ranked space science institutions.
UNSW’s citation rate was the second highest amongst Australian universities, just behind ANU’s (16.09).

A new wide-field panorama reveals more than a thousand supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, some up to several billion times more massive than the sun. This survey, taken in a region of the Bootes constellation, involved 126 separate Chandra exposures of 5,000-seconds each, making it the largest contiguous field ever obtained by the observatory. At 9.3 square degrees, it is over 40 times larger than the full moon seen on the night sky, which is also shown in this graphic for scale.

Smithsonian scientists and colleagues report a new study that may shake up the way paleontologists think about how environmental change shapes life on Earth. The researchers summarized the environmental, ecological and evolutionary consequences for Caribbean shallow-water marine communities when the Isthmus of Panama was formed. They concluded that extinctions resulting when one ocean became two were delayed by 2 million years.
Researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and London's Natural History Museum report their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on March 12.

Perceived attractiveness is the result of compatibility of biological sex and gendered cues--masculinity and femininity as specified within the society—according to a study by researchers at New York University and Texas A & M University.

The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health is among the first medical centers in the country taking part in a novel clinical trial investigating if a subject's own stem cells can treat a form of severe coronary artery disease.
The trial, just underway at UW Hospital and Clinics, is enrolling subjects in the Autologous Cellular Therapy CD34-Chronic Myocardial Ischemia (ACT34-CMI) Trial. The first patient underwent the procedure March 7. Because the study is randomized and "double-blinded," however, neither the patient nor the research physician knows if he received his own stem cells or a placebo substance.
This trial is the first human Phase II adult stem cell therapy study in the U.S.

Plant and animal diseases can play a major and poorly appreciated role in allowing the invasion of exotic species, which in turn often threatens biodiversity, ecological function and the world economy, researchers say in a new report.
In particular, a plant pathogen appears to have opened the gate for the successful invasion of non-native grasses into much of California, one of the world's largest documented cases of invading species and one that dramatically changed the history and ecology of a vast grassland ecosystem.

Global air network showing hotspots for invasion of foreign species. Credit: University of Oxford.

A new study by Christopher Plowe and colleagues (University of Maryland School of Medicine) on a malaria vaccine used at a testing site in Mali calls into question whether the best vaccine was chosen to be tested at this particular site.
The development of an effective malaria vaccine is not easy, in part because there are different strains of the Plasmodium parasite that causes the disease. The different strains carry different variants (alleles) of the genes encoding parasite components (antigens) used in test vaccines, which means that the parasites causing infection in a given location may differ from the ones used for vaccination. If this is the case, the immune response generated by the vaccine might be less effective or even ineffective.

Researchers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center report the results of a six-year experiment in which doubling the atmospheric greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) in a scrub oak ecosystem caused a reduction in carbon storage in the soil.
The scientists said this response suggests a limited capacity of Earth’s ecosystems to stabilize atmospheric CO2 and slow global warming. These findings add a new perspective and a measure of caution suggesting that elevated CO2, by altering microbial communities, may turn a potential carbon sink into a carbon source.
Previous studies have shown that plants will respond to higher CO2 by increasing growth and taking up much of the excess carbon.

New research suggests that a child's race may be a factor in determining his/her susceptibility to tobacco toxins associated with environmental tobacco smoke (ETS). The study, published in the March issue of CHEST, the peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP), reveals that African American children with asthma, who are exposed to ETS, have significantly higher toxin levels when compared to their Caucasian counterparts.
"African American children suffer from higher rates of tobacco-related disorders, such as asthma, sudden-infant death syndrome, and low birth weight, and we need to know why," said lead author Stephen Wilson MD, University of Cincinnati.

Sexual victimization can mean several things -- verbal coercion to have sex with an intimate partner, rape by a stranger, a woman fondled in a bar or forced intercourse when a woman is too intoxicated to consent or object.
Researchers at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions report that 18 percent of young women recruited into a study experienced sexual victimization in a two-year period. Victimization was defined as unwanted sexual contact, verbally coerced sex, rape or attempted rape. Among this group, the majority (approximately 66 percent) stated that their victimization was perpetrated by an intimate partner.

Two Iowa State University botanists and their colleague at the University of North Carolina have discovered a new species of North American bamboo in the hills of Appalachia. It is the third known native species of the hardy grass. The other two were discovered more than 200 years ago.
Lynn Clark, Iowa State professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology, and Ph.D. student Jimmy Triplett study bamboo diversity and evolution. They first heard about "hill cane" from Alan Weakley, a botanist at the University of North Carolina. Although the plant was known to the people in the area, its distinctiveness was not recognized.

Fig. 2. Arundinaria appalachiana. A.

Imagine having a discussion with Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein on the nature of the universe, where their 3-D, life-sized representations looked you in the eye, examined your body language, considered voice nuances and phraseology of your questions, then answered you in a way that is so real you would swear the images were alive.
This was an opening scene from an episode of the TV show "Star Trek" almost a decade and a half ago. A new research project between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Central Florida in Orlando may soon make such imaginary conversations a reality.
Technology from computer games, animation and artificial intelligence provide the elements to make this happen.