Science & Technology

Waiting rooms at the doctor’s office are stressful places; you wait nervously for your name to be called as you flip through the provided reading materials and compulsively check your watch, wishing you could be anywhere else except on the receiving end of a devilishly long needle. Now imagine that the waiting room you are in has 18,000 other patients in it, all of you have chronic liver failure and only a quarter of you get a transplant. That is the hell endured by everyone on the liver transplant list.

A recent research study by UC Davis scientists may help bomb-sniffing dogs and their handlers become more accurate in their searches.

The energy powerhouses of cells, called mitochondria, are much more dynamic than basic illustrations of cell organelles suggest. Mitochondria constantly split and fuse depending on the needs of the cell; they split when they need to move around the cell and fuse when they need to make energy that the cell can use.

I told someone recently that it’s a miracle not all my columns are about insects.

Dropbox is a website that allows you to store files and access them from any computer with an Internet connection. You can even create a folder on your computer desktop that will automatically sync to your Dropbox account so anything in that folder is always available to you.

What would you do if you could live forever? Would you climb every mountain? Read every book? Formulate plans for world domination? Embarrassingly, our greatest scientific minds have been beaten to the punch by a tiny little jellyfish, measuring no more than five millimeters across.

When neuroscientist Frank Sharp looks at a classroom of elementary-school students he sees the signs of Tourette Syndrome. Kids fidget, they squirm, they tic.

Have you ever met someone and recognized their face, but without any distinct memory from where? Or have you ever smelled something that invokes a strong emotion in you, but you had no idea why?

If you recently bought a new computer, plan to or are tired of your word processor, you should check out OpenOffice.

Scientists at UCLA have collaborated to create a microscope that displays images of neurons in 3D.

How can a car that runs 100 miles per gallon change the world? A car is just a car, and even one that reaches efficiencies never before seen on the world’s roads will not make any difference on its own. The real change comes when that car ceases to be just a car, and becomes a paradigm of the future.

Inside the Consilience of Art and Science exhibit at the Pence Gallery is a large sculpture in a corner by a window facing the street. From a distance it appears to be a large piece of white manufactured plastic, about six feet tall and with irregularly shaped holes. On closer inspection, the sculpture is actually constructed from plastic wrap twisted and wired together. Noises of birds and insects softly permeate the small room.