Group B Streptococcus (GBS), a bacterial pathogen that causes sepsis and meningitis in newborn infants, is able to shut down immune cell function in order to promote its own survival, according to researchers. More

A hyper-realistic Einstein robot at the University of California, San Diego has learned to smile and make facial expressions through a process of self-guided learning. More

A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable “dark matter” believed to make up much of the mass of the universe. More

Rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean have been shown to adversely affect shell-forming creatures and corals, and now a new study by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego has shown for the first time that CO2 can impact a fundamental bodily structure in fish. More

Effective drugs for treating a chemotherapy-resistant form of lymphoma might already be on the market according to a study that has pieced together a chemical pathway involved in the disease. More

Patients seeking treatment for atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart beat, may benefit from a new technology now available at UC San Diego Medical Center. More

Two computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Networked Systems (CNS) are among 60 professors worldwide to receive awards as part of HP’s 2009 Innovation Research Program, which is designed to create opportunities for colleges, universities and research institutes around the world to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP. More

Research led by a leading expert on the positive benefits of napping at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep enhances creative problem-solving. The findings may have important implications for how sleep, specifically REM sleep, fosters the formation of associative networks in the brain. More

Engineering students at UC San Diego are studying the fluid dynamics of water in order to build a more comfortable and sanitary urine collection device for space travel. The mechanical and aerospace engineering undergraduates from the Jacobs School of Engineering mimicked the behavior of streams of human urine in zero gravity. More

Researchers from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have uncovered a remarkable property of the contractile ring, a structure required for cell division. Understanding how the contractile ring works to divide the cell may facilitate development of therapies to prevent uncontrolled cell division in cancer. More

Oxidative stress has been linked to aging, cancer and other diseases in humans. Paradoxically, researchers have suggested that small exposure to oxidative conditions may actually offer protection from acute doses. Now, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have discovered the gene responsible for this effect. More

UC San Diego computer scientists are one step closer to building low cost networks of underwater sensors for real time underwater environmental monitoring. At the IEEE Reconfigurable Architectures Workshop in Rome, Italy, on May 25, computer scientists from the Jacobs School of Engineering presented a paper highlighting the energy conservation benefits of using reconfigurable hardware rather than competing hardware platforms for their experimental underwater sensor nets. More

As part of a multi-center clinical trial, UC San Diego Medical Center is evaluating the safety and effectiveness of a potential new way to treat angina — by injecting a protein that stimulates the growth of new oxygen-rich blood vessels directly into the heart. Angina is a debilitating form of chest pain caused by coronary artery disease that affects more than nine million Americans. More

Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered a family of green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) in a primitive sea animal, along with new clues about the role of the proteins that has nothing to do with their famous glow. More

A team of UC San Diego-led atmospheric chemistry researchers moved closer to what is considered the "holy grail" of climate change science when it made the first-ever direct detection of biological particles within ice clouds. More

In technology that promises to one day allow drug delivery to be tailored to an individual patient and a particular cancer tumor, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, have developed an efficient system for delivering siRNA into primary cells. More

Rare and unique ecological communities will be lost if oceanic islands aren’t adequately considered in a global conservation plan, a new study from UC San Diego and two universities in Germany has found. More

In the Sierra Neveda, snowpack will shrink by 30 to 90 percent by the end of the century. On the other side of the planet, in the Himalayas, about 70 percent of glaciers are set to disappear. These changes are both caused by climate change and will lead to dramatic water shortages for hundreds of millions of people across the globe, scientists said during a press conference Wednesday at UC San Diego. More

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego – led by 2008 Nobel-Prize winner Roger Tsien, PhD – have shown that bacterial proteins called phytochromes can be engineered into infrared-fluorescent proteins (IFPs). Because the wavelength of IFPs is able to penetrate tissue, these proteins are suitable for whole-body imaging in small animals. Their findings will be published in the May 8 edition of the journal Science. More

The electrical engineering and computer science undergraduates from the Jacobs School of Engineering wrote the software to teach the robot to solve a maze. The team unveiled their mouse at the IEEE Region 6 Southwest Area Spring Meeting on Saturday, April 25th, held at UC San Diego. More