February 9, 2012
Fish farming cages are clearly visible through Google Earth’s satellite images and University of British Columbia researchers have used them to estimate the amount of fish being cultivated in the Mediterranean.
The study, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, is the first to estimate seafood production using satellite imagery.
February 5, 2012
UBC researchers have discovered the molecular pathway that enables receptors inside immune cells to find, and flag, fragments of pathogens trying to invade a host.
The discovery of the role played by the molecule CD74 could help immunologists investigate treatments that offer better immune responses against cancers, viruses and bacteria, and lead to more efficient vaccines.
The findings are published in this week’s edition of Nature Immunology.
January 19, 2012
Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but diamond miners may have a fairly simple chemical reaction to thank for much of their industry’s success.
Geologists have long known that diamonds are often embedded and transported upward to the Earth's surface by molten kimberlites.
But kimberlites are dense, large rocks, and the question of how they erupt to the surface--sometimes in a matter of days or hours from depths as great as 120 kilometres--has been a mystery.
January 16, 2012
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have found a new way to block infection from the hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the liver that could lead to new therapies for those affected by this and other infectious diseases.
January 9, 2012
UBC and University of Edinburgh astronomers have mapped dark matter on the largest scale ever observed, according to results released today at the winter American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. The findings, presented by Dr Catherine Heymans of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Associate Professor Ludovic Van Waerbeke of UBC, reveal a Universe comprised of an intricate cosmic web of dark matter and galaxies that spans more than one billion light years.
January 3, 2012
Professor Michael Bennett, an expert in Number Theory and Diophantine problems, has been appointed head of the Department of Mathematics effective January 1, 2012.
Bennett received his PhD in mathematics from UBC in 1993, and after appointments at the University of Michigan, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, rejoined UBC as an associate professor in 2001.
December 29, 2011
Rosie Redfield, the UBC microbiologist who has been one of the most vocal critics of the NASA-funded 'arsenic-life' study, has been named by the journal Nature as one of Ten People Who Mattered This Year.
December 6, 2011
UBC scientists have helped build the world's largest astronomy camera with a 'super-cool' internal temperature.
The 4.5-tonne SCUBA-2 (Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array) camera, unveiled today as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, will survey wavelengths invisible to optical cameras and capture unprecedented information about the formation of stars.
November 29, 2011
Hawaii's main volcano chains--the Loa and Kea trends--have distinct sources of magma and unique plumbing systems connecting them to the Earth’s deep mantle, according to UBC research published this week in Nature Geoscience, in conjunction with researchers at the universities of Hawaii and Massachusetts.
This study is the first to conclusively relate geochemical differences in surface lava rocks from both chains to differences in their deep mantle sources, 2,800 kilometres below the Earth’s surface, at the core-mantle boundary.
November 28, 2011
The biodiversity loss caused by climate change will result from a combination of rising temperatures and predation – and may be more severe than currently predicted, according to a study by University of British Columbia zoologist Christopher Harley.
The study, published in the current issue of the journal Science, examined the response of rocky shore barnacles and mussels to the combined effects of warming and predation by sea stars.
