In the cover story for the journal
Genetics this month, neurobiologist Dan Chase and colleagues describe a new experimental technique they developed that will allow scientists to study the function of individual proteins in individual cell types in a living organism.
The advance should allow deeper insights into protein function, Chase says, “because we can only get a true understanding of what that single protein does when we isolate its function in a living organism. There was no tool currently available to do this.”
The journal’s cover art uses a jigsaw puzzle of a worm to
The National Academy of Sciences has awarded a three-year, $271,930 grant to Chemistry professor Vincent Rotello to develop, test and deploy new, sensitive, reliable and affordable inkjet-printed, nanoparticle-based test strips for detecting disease-causing bacteria in drinking water, with researchers at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan.
A proposal to freeze tuition and fees for the coming academic year moved ahead July 1 as the Legislature approved $39 million in additional funding for the UMass system as part of a $34 billion state budget and sent the measure to Gov. Deval Patrick.
Reporting this month in Molecular Microbiology, assistant professor of Biochemistry amd Molecuar Biology Peter Chien and colleagues describe using a combination of biochemistry and mass spectrometry to “trap” scores of new candidate substrates of the protease ClpXP to reveal how protein degradation is critical to cell cycle progression and bacterial development. The new understanding could lead to identifying new antibiotic targets.
President Barack Obama’s office has named computer science education pioneer Beverly Woolf a Presidential Innovation Fellow for 2013, recognizing her leadership in designing software tutors that respond to a student’s mood and personal learning pace, for example, to dramatically improve lesson effectiveness.
The results of a new campus survey show that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum oppose the outsourcing of lethal military and defense targeting decisions to machines. The opposition to autonomous weaponry is bipartisan, with the strongest opposition on the far left and far right, and among active and former members of the military.
Meeting in Lowell, the Board of Trustees on June 19 authorized President Robert L. Caret to raise tuition and fees by up to 4.9 percent for the coming academic year if the Legislature’s compromise budget does not include a $39 million funding increase for the five-campus system.
Taking advantage of UMass Amherst’s investment in cutting-edge analytical equipment for geosciences research, several visiting geologists who collected the first subglacial sediment cores ever extracted from a lake deep below the west Antarctic ice sheet recently spent three days at the campus’s Hartshorn Quaternary Lab using two rare, state-of-the-art machines to analyze their hard-won samples.
The Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies will be hosting two faculty from the University of Toronto as scholars in residence for the fall semester.