Natural Sciences & Mathematics

The pain was particularly intense when she swam the breaststroke. “My legs would bend back and my kneecaps would bang against the cartilage,” Alicia Mullis said. “That’s not supposed to happen. The cap should fit in a nice little groove, but my kneecaps are a little off center.”

Two UNC researchers who lost friends to cancer are working on a promising new drug that could eliminate some of the painful side effects of chemotherapy for future patients. The pre-clinical findings developed by chemist Matthew R. Redinbo and his graduate student Bret Wallace, the paper’s first author, are published in the journal Science. Their

An international team of scientists has developed a way to predict how much a person can learn, based on studies at UC Santa Barbara’s Brain Imaging Center. A study published in the April 18 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) details the findings. Study co-author Peter Mucha is professor and chair in the

Oyster reefs in North Carolina estuaries have collapsed over the last century, leading to the loss of important ecosystem goods and services they provide to the people in this state. Oysters provide critical nursery habitat for fisheries, biofiltration and shoreline stabilization. Their value as ecosystem engineers greatly outweighs their value as a fisheries commodity. However,

The road from fish tank to wave tank started with a stick of dynamite. In constructing Chapman Hall, contractors miscalculated either the density of the bedrock or the strength of the blasting material and ended up with a foundation hole deeper than they expected. No one recalls who made the decision to retain the underground

Junior physics major Susan Clark traveled halfway around the world last summer hunting tiny super-heroes who can withstand extreme conditions. These microscopic animals can survive boiling, freezing, radiation, exposure to the vacuum of space and very long periods of dehydration. Clark is a Morehead-Cain Scholar-turned-microorganism detective who is interested in astrobiology research. She teamed up

When a child is born with an obstructed airway, physicians can intervene with different types of surgery. But to decide whether to operate and when, and which procedures to offer, doctors must make educated guesses, relying heavily on their own experience. “Typically it’s very young children with these problems, so the challenge in deciding the

From the very first moments of life, hatchling loggerhead sea turtles have an arduous task. They must embark on a transoceanic migration, swimming from the Florida coast eastward to the North Atlantic and then gradually migrating over the course of several years before returning again to North American shores. Now, researchers reporting online on February