Discoveries  






Scientist at Work: NASA supporting IU astronomer's quest to develop largest star formation database ever

Samir Salim Samir Salim has a lot of space to fit into a new NASA-funded database; about 11 million galaxies of it would be a ballpark estimate based on the number of galaxies for which distances can be estimated to about 3.5 billion light years, what astronomers still refer to as the relatively "local" universe. But the Indiana University astronomer and research scientist believes the vast archives produced by NASA space telescopes and ground-based observatories hold the right information to create the largest resource ever for the study of how star formation proceeds in galaxies.  Full Story

IU School of Medicine research funding sparks $370 million in Hoosier economic activity

Medical Research

Public research funds received by the Indiana University School of Medicine and its partner hospitals boosted the Hoosier economy by about $370 million in 2009, according to a study released by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

 Full Story

Indiana Alzheimer Disease Center receives $9.1 million from NIH to continue dementia research

Alzheimer Brain Scan

The National Institutes of Health has renewed funding to the Indiana Alzheimer Disease Center at Indiana University School of Medicine for the fifth consecutive five-year term, awarding the center its largest grant yet of $9.1 million. The grant will enable the Indiana center's scientists and doctors to continue their work in state-of-the-art research aimed at developing better understanding of the causes and potential treatments for Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.

 Full Story

Mismatch in face and voice of human-looking characters, robots makes us feel creepy

CG Heads

It sounds like a location in a Stephen King novel, but for producers of animated characters or robots that look imperfectly human, it is all too real: the uncanny valley. A new study examines whether a mismatch between the human realism of a character's face and voice causes it to be evaluated as eerie. It concludes that this mismatch causes the uncanny valley effect as well.

 Full Story

Biocomplexity researchers announce multi-scale model of early embryonic development in vertebrates

Segmentation

Scientists at Indiana University's Biocomplexity Institute have developed a computational model for the intricate cellular dance that occurs during the earliest stages of animal development when embryonic segments called somites form. Somites eventually give rise to the internal scaffolding of life: For common earthworms, that scaffolding is 100 or so body segments; in humans, it's a segmented mass of cell layers in the early embryo that leads to the formation of muscles, vertebrae, limbs, ribs and the tailbone.

 Full Story

Study: A rich club in the human brain

Rich Club brain

Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought more attention to financial disparities between the haves and have-nots in American society, researchers from Indiana University and the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands are highlighting the disproportionate influence of so-called "rich clubs" within the human brain.

 Full Story

IU biologists identify light-regulated mechanism in cyanobacteria as aid to optimizing photosynthesis

Cyanobacteria

Indiana University biologists have uncovered how a control system works in producing the important light-harvesting antennae that power photosynthesis in cyanobacteria, the microorganisms that are progenitors of all land plants and responsible for nearly half of the Earth's current oxygen production.

 Full Story

Previous issue

Bryan Schneider

The October 2011 issue of Discoveries featured a story on Bryan Schneider, IU associate professor of medicine and medical and molecular genetics, who is also a physician/scientist at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center and the Shawn Hanson Investigator in Breast Cancer Research. Also in this issue were stories about IU's recent $700,000 award from the U.S. Department of Energy to study Lake Erie wind resources; a story about IU scientists' research on constructing the cDNA libraries for the first-ever genome sequence of a non-bird reptile; details on an IU physicist who is in the spotlight for possibly discovering a unified theory tying together quantum physics and gravity that could lead to tiny but observable deviations from Einstein's Theory of Relativity; and many other stories.

 Full Story






  Copyright © 2010 The Trustees of Indiana University | 107 S. Indiana Ave.  |  Bloomington, IN 47405-7000  |  Comments: iunewsed@indiana.edu  |   Subscribe  

Delivery Tip: To ensure delivery to your inbox (not junk folders), please add iunewsed@indiana.edu to your address book or contacts.