Latest Brown University Stories
Connecticut businessman Howard J. Brown released "Design Matters: Doing Better with Less." In the video, Brown uses a story he originally heard Buckminster Fuller tell and explains why the key to our future and the key to successful design, innovation, and business strategy is producing drastically more benefits with drastically fewer resources: dMASS. New Haven, CT (PRWEB) January 7, 2011 This week, a company founded by Connecticut businessman Howard J. Brown released, "Design...
A novel potential therapy based on a natural human protein significantly slows muscle damage and improves function in mice who have the same genetic mutation as boys with the most common form of muscular dystrophy, according to a paper published online Dec. 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is a fatal genetic mutation in about one of every 3,500 boys. They are unable to produce a protein called dystrophin that keeps muscles strong. By eight...
Researchers at Brown University and in Korea have described the dynamics behind cutting single-walled carbon nanotubes, cylindrical structures just 1/50,000th the width of a human hair. The tubes are compressed by potent sonic booms, causing them to buckle at certain points at helical, 90-degree angles. The finding could lead to better-quality nanotubes for potential use in automotive, electronics, optics and other fields. Results appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.A pipefitter...
A newly published insight into the biology of many kinds of less-aggressive but still lethal brain tumors, or gliomas, opens up a wide array of possibilities for new therapies, according to scientists at Brown University and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). In paper published online Dec. 15 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, they describe how a genetic mutation leads to an abnormal metabolic process in the tumors that could be targeted by drug...
The Fairfield County InfoSec Group met on November 11 in Westport, Connecticut, to hear David Sherry, Chief Information Security Officer for Brown University, speak on "This Isn't Your Mother's Internet: Mitigating Web 2.0 Threats." (PRWEB) December 10, 2010 The Fairfield County InfoSec Group met on November 11 in Westport, Connecticut, to hear David Sherry, Chief Information Security Officer for Brown University, speak on "This Isn't Your Mother's Internet: Mitigating...
Christopher Kahler and colleagues at Brown and USC tracked symptoms of depression in people who were trying to quit smoking. They found that people were never happier than when they were kicking the habit and remaining free from smoking. Results of the study were published online Nov. 24, 2010, in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.Quitting smoking is certainly healthy for the body, but doctors and scientists haven't been sure whether quitting makes people happier, especially since...
Scientists have analyzed images from the EPOXI mission's pictures taken of comet Hartley 2 and found a cometary snow storm created by carbon dioxide jets spewing out tons of ice particles. Scientists compared the new images to ones taken from a comet the spacecraft had previously visited, Tempel 1. "This is the first time we've ever seen individual chunks of ice in the cloud around a comet or jets definitively powered by carbon dioxide gas," Michael A'Hearn, principal...
On the rocks just beneath the tides, the faster the water is moving in an area, the greater the variety of invertebrate creatures that will live there. Understanding that water flow is a strong predictor of diversity could be a huge boon to efforts to manage coastal ecosystems.One of biggest factors promoting the diversity of coastal ocean life is how fast the water flows, according to new research by ecologists at Brown University. Experiments and observation in Palau, Alaska, and Maine...
The website of the Nobel Prize shows a cat resting in a graphene hammock. Although fictitious, the image captures the excitement around graphene, which, at one atom thick, is the among the thinnest and strongest materials ever produced.A significant obstacle to realizing graphene's potential lies in creating a surface large enough to support a theoretical sleeping cat. For now, material scientists stitch individual graphene sheets together to create sheets that are large enough to investigate...
Films of bacteria that form around foreign materials in the body can be very difficult to defeat with drugs, but research led by Brown University biologists has identified a couple proteins that play a key role in building these "biofilms." This pair could prove to be a very important target for developing new antibiotics to fight infections.When a foreign object such as a catheter enters the body, bacteria may not only invade it but also organize into a slick coating "” a biofilm "” that...
