The University of Vermont will coordinate a $19 million, five-year National Science Foundation project to design and test a national observatory for exploring life’s smallest structures in three dimensions. Working with UC San Diego, researchers will combine advanced electron microscopy, artificial intelligence and powerful computing to expand access to imaging capabilities currently concentrated in specialized laboratories. Pilot studies will investigate how learning changes brain wiring, how vision varies across species, how a parasite crosses the blood-brain barrier, and how single-celled organisms are organized. The project will lay the groundwork for a shared national resource serving researchers across biology and medicine.

Alaska's orange, rusted rivers from melting permafrost are even more acidic than water leached from metal mines — an increasingly common mark of climate change, finds a UC Davis study.

The bacteria living on frogs’ skin could serve a vital role in protecting the animal from a deadly fungal disease. A team of researchers led by Penn State scientists found that frogs’ natural skin bacteria can help them fight disease and improve their chances of survival.

The Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, preceded by decades of breakthroughs in genetics. It eventually gave us a sequence of the human genome. Yet, while the physical rules behind the genome’s organization remain an active area of research, many questions are still largely unanswered. Among these is the impact of an omnipresent force influencing life on Earth: gravity. A new study, which appears in the journal Science Advances, addresses some of these weighty questions by using an innovative technique: creating a zero-gravity, or microgravity, environment in order to reveal gravity’s impact on a human cell. 

A research team led by faculty at the Duke Quantum Center (DQC) has observed string-breaking dynamics related to particle-antiparticle formation on a quantum simulator, one of the first in the quantum-physics field.

As record-breaking global temperatures and extreme weather events spark intense debate over global warming speed-up, a new study led by UC Santa Cruz reveals how warming is accelerating differently across distinct regions.