Science & Technology

101021_sc_Yellowstone_tempHeadline: Radio-equipped sensors advance volcano researchLayercake: New data-loggers at Yellowstone provide 24-hour temperature infoBy CAMMIE ROLLEAggie Science Writer To confirm a theory, you must have...

Given the average man's stoicism concerning his own health, it's no surprise that men suffer from higher disease rates and a shorter life span than women. Luckily, a new program in the UC Davis Health System aims to raise men's awareness of health problems early on and hopefully close the longevity gap between men and women.

When most people think of pigs, they may think of the movie Babe, just a cute little animal or a barbecue, but when scientists and undergraduate students at UC Davis get involved, they think of nematodes.

A possible scene from 500 million years ago: The ocean floor crawls with roving packs of arthropods called trilobites. Instead of sticking to its normal diet of plankton or algae, one hungry trilobite looks around at its trilobite friends and sees dinner. Welcome to cannibalism in the deep.

Sometimes, buried in the wreckage of blood and hate, you find that violence has a bright side.

Zoë Stachel had been in the wilderness of Alaska for four weeks before she made a breakthrough.

Down Old Davis Road, just across the railroad tracks and under the freeway, sits one of Davis' hidden treasures: the California Raptor Center.

The universe is a violent place. Not only did we start with an explosive Big Bang, but our solar system is continuously shaped by the desperate pull of gravity.

For American soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, experiments conducted in the labs of UC Davis might mean the difference between life and death. Researchers in the UC Davis department of materials science recently designed a superstrong aluminum alloy that could be used to strengthen the shells of military vehicles.

In early September, Ryosuke Motani stood in Anhui Province, China at the foot of a cliff called Turtle Mountain, watching a backhoe scrape part of the mountain's precious fossil record into dust. The cliff is part of a limestone mine that is the center of the local economy, but it also happens to house one of the world's richest deposits of ichthyosaur fossils. Motani, a UC Davis professor of paleontology, visited the province last month on a twofold mission: to excavate fossils, and to petition local governments to conserve sites like this one.

Last week we looked at whether it would be possible to clone Abraham Lincoln from the hair and blood samples preserved in a museum. Sadly, it wouldn't (the DNA is probably too degraded). But the issue of cloning a celebrity brings up the age-old nature vs. nurture debate. How much of your personality is governed by your environment and how much do you owe to your genes?

Thirty-six million years ago, in the land of modern-day Peru, lived a five-foot tall penguin. Scientists announced on Friday the discovery of Inkayca paracacensis, a flightless seabird that makes today's emperor penguins look shrimpy. Fossils of the giant penguin show that it had twice the body mass of an emperor penguin and a pointy beak about 23 centimeters long.

Could a bag of chicken scraps help protect an endangered species? The answer is yes.

The average cost of red Roma tomatoes at Safeway is $0.56 each. The average cost of a pack of 75 seeds to grow tomato plants - yielding bunches of tomatoes seasonally - is $1.59. For most college students, the latter, cheaper price holds more appeal. But how do you know if your backyard is suitable for growing tomatoes?

I stood six inches away from Abraham Lincoln's DNA.