Instead of writing down every interesting thought or passage while studying, use a highlighter pen it, so it’s easy to find and reference later. Here is a handful of the hundreds of highlighter pens out there. These are the cream of the crop, designed to last a while and come with several in a package to make them a better value. Take note of the differences of each as you discover which highlighter pens are best for you. 

 Some highlights of the highlighters 

The very first highlighter pens sold were Hi-Liters, which makes the Avery Hi-Liters the best and the original pens. They are designed to be used on anything and anywhere and are reliable to the end. The AmazonBasics highlighters are good, too. They aren’t as bulky as the Hi-Liters and are easier to carry around.

For kids, we recommend the Crayola Take Note highlighter pack. These are designed to withstand the creative colorful nature of kids who want to do a bit more than simply highlight. The Zebra Pen Mildliners are also designed for coloring in addition to highlighting. They come with more pens and colors compared to the other highlighters we looked at.

These images were contributed to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

During times of increased population, this dainty animal responds by breeding earlier, with the result being smaller pups that grow faster. Researchers from the University of Michigan and their colleagues at the Kluane Red Squirrel Project to examine the long-term effects of stress on wild populations. Read more about the research in "Squirrel Moms' Stress Aids Pup Survival " and see images from some of the studies below.

On to safety

A red squirrel moves her pup from one nest to another. (Credit: Ryan Taylor.)

Giving a warning

A red squirrel emits a territorial call. Pipe cleaners attached to ear tags ease identification. (Credit: Ryan Taylor.)

Tiny tots

These pups are 25 days old. (Credit: Ben Dantzer.)

Checking in

Pups are ready for a weight check. (Credit: Ben Dantzer.)

Getting a snack

A red squirrel consumes white spruce seeds. (Credit: Ryan Taylor.)

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the Research in Action archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

If jam-packed highways, back-to-back meetings and too little time for "to-do" lists make you tense, consider the red squirrels of the Yukon. Regardless of how much food they have, these mammals experience a significant amount of stress when their numbers increase.

During population booms, this compact mammal, which weighs about as much as a cell phone, breeds earlier in the year and produces smaller-sized litters with pups that grow quickly. But what cues the females to hasten their offspring's growth? To answer this question, Ben Dantzer at the University of Michigan and colleagues with the Kluane Red Squirrel Project hooked up hundreds of speakers in the forest and simulated a burgeoning population by blaring squirrel chatter.

Mothers who gave birth after the simulation produced offspring that grew at a faster rate than those born to females in a control group, even without additional food. This increased growth improved the offspring's survival chances and was driven by higher levels of the stress hormone glucocorticoid. Researchers discovered the latter fact by analyzing the mothers' fecal matter.

Dantzer and his colleagues now want to determine if accelerated growth is due solely to hormonal programming before birth or if maternal behavioral changes after birth play a role. To study this issue, the researchers are developing radio collars with cameras to monitor nesting activities. The devices will provide a rough idea of how much attention mothers give their offspring through nursing and licking, two behaviors that can hasten growth, according to Dantzer. [Stressed Out Mongooses Can't Cope with Baby Booms]

When the collars are operational, the researchers will repeat the loudspeaker experiment and then follow offspring over the course of their lifetimes, which can extend to eight years in the wild. This close-up view will provide an opportunity to learn about the effects of rapid growth on aging.

"Over the last 20 years a major emphasis in biomedicine has been that prenatal stress is bad," says Dantzer. "But there may be some benefit to exposing the offspring of wild animals to stress. By studying species such as red squirrels, we can learn about the unique ways these animals cope with environmental challenges and may figure out solutions to some of the world's health problems related to stress."

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the Research in Action archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Bees are big business. According to the White House, pollinators contribute more than $24 billion to the U.S. economy. A little more than one-third of that total comes from wild pollinators, such as native bumblebees and exotic alfalfa leafcutter bees. Because pollinators play such a critical role in agriculture and maintaining native ecosystems, their population declines and health challenges have prompted a federal strategy to research, prevent and reverse pollinator losses. (All images courtesy Noah Fram-Schwartz)

Sphecodes male, Connecticut

To improve the quality of pollinator data available to researchers and policymakers, NSF-funded researchers spearheaded the digitization and consolidation of specimen records from 10 North American bee collections. In just three years, the Digital Bee Collection Network (DBCN) has grown to more than 1 million bee records and is one of the largest sources of quantitative data available on North American bees.

Trachusa dorsalis female, New Jersey

Such a resource is critical to understanding the issues facing pollinators. “Issues such as colony collapse, which affects honey bees, are controversial topics. We need historical baseline data, as well as reliable current data, to address bee declines,” says principal investigator John Ascher, formerly a research scientist with the American Natural History Museum (ANHM) and now working at the National University of Singapore. 

Augochlora pura female, Connecticut

In the past, researchers wrote data on cards and, more recently, used word processing or spreadsheet files. “The problem with this local approach is that the data aren’t available for other users,” explains Ascher. “We’re trying to capture the data in a uniform, efficient way and make it widely available.” [Explained: The Physics-Defying Flight of the Bumblebee ]

Xylocopa virginica virginica male, Connecticut

Ascher and Jerome Rozen of ANHM digitized specimen records using software called Arthropod Easy Capture (AEC) — a data capture tool created by ANHM curator emeritus Randall “Toby” Schuh for an NSF-funded biodiversity project. Starting with the museum’s bee collections, they tagged each specimen with a unique barcode that included details such as habitat location, date discovered and other ecological information, such as the pollinator’s favorite host plant. Researchers at Cornell University, Rutgers University, the University of California Davis and the University of Connecticut also digitized their collections using AEC software. 

Lasioglossum (Dialictus) female, Connecticut

These data and additional bee databases compiled by co-principal investigator Douglas Yanega, University California Riverside, and collaborators from the USDA Bee Biology and Systematics Laboratory at Utah State University were integrated into the digital network using the biodiversity portal Discover Life (DL).

Caupolicana male, Maine

As part of a broader effort to disseminate comprehensive information on the more than 20,000 known bee species, maps on the DL species pages together with millions of records from the Global BIodiversity Information Facility are available to partners such as the Encyclopedia of Life. 

The public can contribute data on plant-pollinator interactions to the network through a “Bee Hunt” — a citizen science project partially funded by NSF. 

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Ghoulishly thick jellyfish swarms — some of which may extend up to 100 miles — commonly form in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer. The accompanying video features one-of-a-kind footage of such swarms . 

In the video's narration, jellyfish expert Monty Graham of the University of Southern Mississippi discusses human activities — including the dumping of aircraft carriers, military tanks, bridges and other debris, and overfishing  — that help promote such swarms. Other factors, including climate change figure into the Gulf's explosions of jellyfish populations   as well, he says. 

Graham's research focuses on several areas including marine zooplankton, ecological implications of fishing and climate change in river-dominated systems and the long-term ecosystem dynamics in pulsed river coastal environments. He has researched jellyfish and the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico with NSF funding.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Two familiar items not usually paired: a robot and a cane. At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Cang Ye and his engineering lab team have prototyped a robotic walking stick for the blind. This robot-cane combines the basic physics of a walking stick and the technological efficiencies of a computer system.

Currently, people with visual impairments navigate using aluminum or plastic sticks with rubber ends; these tools are known as white canes or whitesticks. The robot cane is an updated version that facilitates communication between the environment, the cane and the user. The cane can both detect the user’s immediate terrain and store localized geographical information.

It’s equipped with two cameras and Bluetooth audio. The cameras detect objects in the user’s path, such as chairs and stairs, while the audio system communicates to the user. Meanwhile, a computer holds information about recent pathways and objects within them. This allows the cane to recognize the user’s location and guide the user, much as a seeing-eye-dog would do. Like a traditional white cane, the robot cane is adjustable to different lengths.

This hybrid technology was designed under the National Robotics Initiative, funded by National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. The Ye lab partners with World Service for the Blind and Arkansas School for the Blind & Visually Impaired.  Orientation and mobility specialists and students from both of these organizations help test the cane and provide feedback for device refinement. The robot cane is designed to significantly improve independent mobility and quality of life for visually impaired persons. The images accompanying this article depict an actual cane and a schematic of the prototype.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

In his 1923 volume The Prisoner, French novelist Marcel Proust describes memory as a “…sort of chemical laboratory.” This apt definition was ahead of its time, as scientists were just learning about the brain’s anatomy. Nearly a century later, neuroscientists are beginning to discover the chemical and molecular pathways responsible for creating and recalling memories. 

At Rutgers University, Timothy Otto  and his colleagues are delving into the brain’s biochemical activities to determine the ways in which experiences activate genes within brain cells to form lasting memories. The researchers have discovered that the Arc gene and its protein product, also called Arc, play an essential role in the memory formation process. One of tens of thousands of proteins in the brain, Arc is found in the brain’s hippocampus region (the area involved in many forms of learning), and activates as memories form. 

“We’ve shown that to form new memories the hippocampus must produce Arc and that blocking Arc production, blocks memory formation and recall,” explains Otto. 

To zero in on Arc activity in the brains of rats, Otto and his team inject a substance that binds to the Arc gene and then fluoresces or lights up when it produces Arc protein. As the genes and proteins light up, they create a map of the cells involved in memory formation. “With the map we can see how a healthy brain works and the brain regions involved in making new and different types of memory,” says Otto.  

Knowing how a healthy brain forms memories is an important step to understanding what goes wrong in a range of memory disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.  Considering the public health aspects of his work, Otto notes that “figuring out how to fix these disorders is crucial since the number of brain-related disorders will likely skyrocket as the population increasingly ages.” 

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

These tiny woven fibers make up a scaffold that is part of a framework for growing cartilage. 

Each of the scaffold’s seven layers is about as thick as a human hair, with the finished product about 1 millimeter thick. 

Humans and animals suffering from deteriorated articular cartilage — tissue that cushions bone joints — may one day find relief from the new synthetic material that mimics the suppleness and strength of natural cartilage tissue.

Articular cartilage is a durable, load-bearing tissue. Although it can withstand great stress while remaining lubricated enough to support thousands of joint movements, it wears away with overuse, injury or disease. Unfortunately, the uniqueness of this remarkable organic substance makes it difficult to replace. 

Nevertheless, Duke University engineers Farshid Guilak and Xuanhe Zhao developed a flexible, durable tissue that can model the functionality of natural cartilage  They created the synthetic tissue by uniting a 3-D fabric scaffold that Guilak and his team developed in 2007 with a hydrogel that Zhao and a team from Harvard University engineered in 2012. Hydrogels are composed of many molecule chains, called polymers, suspended in water. Just as a steel framework may provide stability for concrete poured over it, the 3-D fabric creates a lattice scaffold that provides stability for the malleable hydrogel.

Zhao’s resilient, lubricating hydrogel integrates with the durable fabric, resulting in a synthetic material that may be injected with stem cells and grown into articular cartilage tissue.

While this new artificial tissue does not serve as an exact replica of natural articular cartilage, it is a highly advanced synthetic material. The technology proves that a functional biomaterial simulating the pliable support of joint cartilage can be produced in the laboratory. "From a mechanical standpoint, this technology remedies the issues that other types of synthetic cartilage have had," says Zhao. "It is a very promising candidate for artificial cartilage in the future."

The National Science Foundation supported the Triangle Center of Excellence for Materials Research and Innovation involvement in this collaborative project, as well as the development of Zhao’s lubricating hydrogel in 2012. The research was described in the December 17, 2013 issue of the journal  Advanced Functional Materials.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Fiber optic networks play a key role in transmitting feature films to laptops, cool apps to smartphones and lifelike video games to game consoles. To ensure networks keep up with consumer demand for speed and seamless data flow, researchers continue to pursue new combinations of electronic and optical devices.

One promising approach involves growing lasers on silicon , the base layer of choice for electronic devices. The lasers, called nanoneedles, are just one-tenth the width of a human hair and were developed by researchers working at the University of California, Berkeley. By growing lasers on silicon wafers, the researchers are expanding the ability of electronics to transmit data at capacities required by next-generation consumer devices and systems. [Fiber Optics Could ‘Humanize’ Future Prosthetic Limbs ]

“On any given integrated circuit now, the electrical power dedicated for communication is really high and bandwidth limited, especially for higher speed trunk lines,” says Connie Chang-Hasnain, who leads the effort. Optical approaches such as lasers reduce power consumption and noise between components and increase speed, she says. "It’s the difference between using a local roadway and a superhighway.”  

To combine the strengths of silicon and optical laser materials, the Berkeley researchers overcame two longstanding challenges that have vexed researchers: 1) the mismatch between the crystalline structures of silicon and III-V semiconductor material, an essential solid-state laser material, and 2) growth temperatures that are incompatible with current integrated circuit fabrication. 

During the 10- to 15-minute crystal growth process, which occurs at temperatures between 400° and 450° C, nanoneedles in the shape of hexagonal pyramids emerge from a silicon base. These high-quality crystals can reach several hundred nanometers and can be layered, doped (i.e., other materials can be added to the crystal during the growth process, resulting in a crystal that has additional properties) or etched to create laser structures for device applications. The nanoneedle geometry provides a natural laser cavity that traps light by circulating it up and down the inside of the nanoneedle in a helical fashion. 

Chang-Hasnain notes that the growth process and use of silicon as a growth medium will make large-scale manufacturing possible when the nanoneedles are ready for commercial use. The strong investment by the electronics industry in a silicon foundry network will enable development of nanolasers for communications as well as other applications such as solar energy and sensing.  

The nanoneedle research is supported in part by the Center for Integrated Access Networks, an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center headquartered at the University of Arizona.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The brain's special abilities entice many engineers to use it as a model for other things they create. In their designs of new control and navigation systems for aircraft, robots and other engineered systems, engineer Silvia Ferrari and her research team at Duke University are emulating the brain's adaptability. They are especially interested in parts of the brain that allow animals to change their movements in response to changing environmental conditions. 

One such part is the brain's hippocampus, which is important for the learning and memory that underlies navigation. In the image above, different parts of hippocampal cells are stained for identification. Neurites (green) are long protrusions from neurons that send and receive signals from other cells. The protein histone lysine demethylase (cyan) contributes to the cell life cycle and early brain development. The protein Arc (red) is expressed where the brain is making changes in neural pathways, a phenomenon known as plasticity. Researchers look for markers of plasticity as evidence that changes, such as learning, are happening in the brain. [Delayed Gratification – How the Hippocampus Helps Us Hold Off (Op-Ed )]

Animal brains  respond to their environments and learn from sensory feedback, such as vision, touch and sound, to improve motor performance. Ferrari's group is using brain-inspired computational models, known as spiking neural networks, and designing algorithms that train modeled neural networks to adapt to external feedback. For example, in one test of their algorithm, they modeled a virtual insect controlled by a spiking neural network to navigate an unknown terrain in a search for food. 

The researchers are also investigating how well their training algorithm works on living neural networks in petri dishes. If successful, the algorithms could be used in control and navigation systems that are used in a variety of engineered systems that must perform well under shifting conditions, such as robots.

Further reading: Brain Power: Bright ideas and smart tools for neuroengineering

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Some consider the lowly moss plant a weed. Others find its luxurious, green abundance across forest floors inspiring. For plant detectives at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, moss, specifically Physcomitrella patens, is a model system that may hold the key to understanding how all cells grow. 

Because animal and plant  cells use many of the same processes to develop their shapes and patterns, findings from this research may advance understanding of fundamental growth processes for multiple kinds of organisms. "There is a gap in our basic knowledge of how cells actually work," says Magdalena Bezanilla, a cell biologist who leads the effort. "It would be nice to see things [animal and plant cell growth] that are so divergent have similar mechanisms."

P. patens' simplicity gives the researchers several advantages in their search for clues about the growth process. It is the only plant that readily permits precise gene targeting.  This allows researchers to remove specific genes and replace them or eliminate them completely and observe the result. The moss can also regenerate a whole plant from a single cell in just seven days. 

Currently, Bezanilla and her team are investigating how the cytoskeleton (a cellular scaffold found in both plant and animal cells) directs growth. In particular, the researchers are determining which molecules drive the process. By targeting certain genes, they can systematically study whether protein interactions, chemical signals or actions that are external to the cytoskeleton direct growth.

"We know the cytoskeleton is important to the process of setting up polarity in cells, but we don't know the detailed mechanism," says Bezanilla. In cells, polarity helps to define shape, cellular organization and function within tissues. 

Once the researchers identify the core set of molecules at the heart of the growth process, the researchers can apply this evidence to two extreme forms of polarity: reproduction and root hair formation. A misstep in either process puts a plant at a significant disadvantage.  For instance, if a pollen tube fails to grow from a pollen grain and transport sperm cells down to a plant's ovary, no new plants will result. If roots fail to generate root hairs, a plant in an arid environment will wither and die. 

"Our findings could have important implications for agriculture," says Bezanilla. Manipulating reproduction could ensure genetically modified plants never cross-pollinate with wild species and controlling root hair growth could create robust plants that withstand limited water resources.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

What have we here? An image that represents how strong and prevalent bacteria biofilms are —despite our efforts to control them with antibiotics and other antimicrobial agents. (A biofilm is a layer —or multilayered community —of microorganisms, such as bacteria, that stick together and coat surfaces. Dental plaque is an example.) Human Hand Controlling Bacterial Biofilms, by artist and Stanford University senior scientists and electron microscopy specialist Lydia-Marié Joubert, won a People's Choice Award in a recent science and engineering visualization contest, known as "SciVis", which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Science magazine.

To create this striking representation, Joubert used a photo she'd taken of a large garden sculpture, in Wales, by the late artist Francis Hewlett. To this digital image she added layers of micrographs, which are images taken through a microscope —in this case, a microscope that uses properties of fluorescence to generate an image. The microbes seen speckling the hand are enlarged 400 times, according to Joubert. The cultured bacteria show up so vividly because they had been stained with dyes that react variously with specimens depending on whether the organisms are dead or alive —in technical terms, the researchers had used a molecular probe called a viability stain.

In this image, the green bacteria are alive and the very few red ones are dead. "Increased antimicrobial resistance often results from our poor understanding of the microbial lifestyle and our fear of bacteria —as revealed in our preference for antimicrobial household detergents and hygiene products, and warfare against microbes through biocides and pesticides in our gardens and natural environment. This leads to increased persistence of bacterial communities, even after repeated antimicrobial treatment," writes Joubert. "Man endeavors to control, microbes continue to thrive and rule on earth."

Note: NSF and Science will begin accepting entries for the 2014 "SciVis" challenge in September.

See the winner's page, 2013 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A lesser-known benefit of biodiversity is that it supplies raw materials for development of new scientific tools — including tools that ultimately benefit our health. For example, two unlikely microbes (which don't even have brains) helped spawn a new field that is revolutionizing brain science. Optogenetics enables scientists to selectively turn on and off target neurons. It is helping science to answer long-standing questions about how billions of neurons in animals' brains interact with one another to produce thoughts and behaviors.

Check out the accompanying video to learn more about how basic research unrelated to neuroscience and funded by the National Science Foundation led to the development of one of today's most promising brain research techniques. Today optogenetics is being used to study many diseases and disorders including schizophrenia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, epilepsy and loss of eyesight.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Although smaller than the width of a human hair, a light-absorbing microchip component promises to provide a big return on performance for solar cells, consumer electronics and even stealth technology. The nanoscale waveguide taper array slows light over a broad range of wavelengths. No small feat, especially since light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second and previous attempts could slow light only over a narrow range of wavelengths.

The taper array comes after five years of theoretical and experimental work by Qiaoqiang Gan, first as a graduate student in Filbert Bartoli' group at Lehigh University and then as a professor at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Gan's efforts resulted in a carefully crafted ultrathin film composed of multiple layers of metal, semiconductor and insulating materials. By etching specific patterns into the layers and adjusting their thickness, the array can absorb a "rainbow" of wavelengths. This will allow for more efficient energy absorption for a number of applications.

In the field of solar energy the array will allow photovoltaic cells to store all of the wavelengths in the solar spectrum. Current cells based on semiconductor materials only absorb specific portions of the solar spectrum. The ability to tune the array across the spectrum also makes it attractive as a device to recycle thermal energy. When integrated with devices that give off heat and radiate electromagnetic waves , the array could help recycle the heat into electricity, improving the performance of a range of devices including consumer electronics.

In the case of optical communications, the array could eliminate noise created by unwanted signals on circuits or in optical channels. In the military arena, when incorporated into military vehicles, the array technology could act as a cloaking device allowing the vehicles to avoid radar, sonar or other forms of detection.

Gan and his colleagues use techniques called sputtering and evaporation to deposit alternating layers of silver and silicon dioxide thin films on a substrate. The researchers then carve out the array on the multilayers with ion beam lithography, a technique that uses ions to transfer the tapered pattern onto the multilayers. By adjusting the thickness of the layers and the shape of the patterns, the researchers determine the array's optical properties.

"The surprising aspect of [this technology] is our ability to design optical absorption over an ultrabroad spectrum," says Gan. "We can tune the absorption of the patterned [array] to any wavelength, from the visible to the microwave region and even finely manipulate the absorption profile to mimic natural materials."

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Deep in the ocean's twilight zone, dragonfish look like creatures crafted for a Hollywood "B" movie. Large eyes, oversized jaws and fang-like teeth mark the heads of these 20- to 40-cm long fish. To attract prey in their shadowy world, dragonfish dangle a glowing, whisker-like barbel from their chins. Dazzled by the lure's light, crustaceans and plankton are an easy catch.

While the mechanics behind the catch seem straightforward, researchers don't know exactly how dragonfish ingest their prey. Because the fish live at depths up to 1,500 meters, field studies remain a challenge. In the past, scientists used comparative analysis and computational modeling to better understand the feeding mechanisms of these fish. While these methods produced a large amount of data and provided an important foundation to understand feeding, they limited the kinds of questions researchers could answer.

As a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University, Christopher Kenaley wanted to develop a less cumbersome and more realistic way to study how deep-sea fish feed. So, he and Harvard colleague George Lauder set out to build a 3-D robotic model of a dragonfish. However, the lack of live feeding data presented a challenge.

Kenaley and Lauder decided to look at how other species feed. Among the roughly 35,000 species of fish, suction is the predominant feeding mechanism. One of the best examples available is the large-mouthed bass. With plenty of live feeding data, the researchers constructed a 3-D robotic model of the bass, nicknamed "Bassbot."The model includes acrylic glass bones and electromagnetic motor muscles covered with a very thin latex skin.

One of Bassbot's critical advantages is the ability it gives the researchers to reproduce experiments. "Moving water is a complicated event and the model provides details on how this occurs and does so consistently," explains Kenaley. "With the model we can quickly assess discrete contributions of any one part of the fish head. This is hard to do with a live animal."

Kenaley views the Bassbot studies as a "stepping stone" to a deep-sea fish research program: "The robot seems like a cost-effective way to study [them]."

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Most people probably wouldn't think wouldn't think particle physics would ever make for an edge-of-your-seat drama. But it has in Particle Fever — a suspenseful, easy-to-understand documentary that chronicles the search for the Higgs boson, which could potentially explain the origin of all matter. More than 10,000 scientists from more than 100 countries at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) conducted the search. Their goal: to recreate conditions that existed moments after the Big Bang — as necessary to find the elusive Higgs particle. [Photos: The World's Largest Atom Smasher (LHC )]

Partially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the documentary also showcases the very human side of physicists who contributed to the experiment — some of whom devoted their entire careers to it.

While discussing the LHC — the biggest machine ever built — as well as the setbacks, challenges and pressures of conducting such a grand experiment, the researchers convey a contagious enthusiasm. As David Kaplan, an NSF-funded researcher who co-produced the movie, said, "It could be nothing other than just understanding everything." [Gallery: Search for the Higgs Boson ]

Check out the movie trailer. The film has already opened in cities in the west and east coasts of the U.S. and will open in Washington, D.C. on March 21^st.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Geologists usually study the Earth, delving into processes such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions or changes in the Earth over time. But a new breed of geologists is going beyond these traditional fields and rocking the connection between living organisms and earth materials.

Steven Lower and Eric Taylor are part of this new breed. While Taylor, now a professor at Kent State University, was a doctoral student in Lower's Ohio State University lab, the two embarked on a study to discover the molecular mechanism driving mesothelioma, an incurable form of cancer that affects the lung, chest cavity and the lining of the abdomen.

This aggressive cancer can develop when humans are exposed to asbestos, a term that refers to six naturally occurring silicate mineral fibers. To learn more about how these fibers may trigger cancer development, Taylor and Lower focused on crocidolite or blue asbestos, the deadliest of the fibers. Because crocidolite is long and thin, it can lodge among the lungs' mesothelial cells, which secrete lubricant to maintain the lung's slippery, protective coating. Unlike another asbestos fiber, chrysotile, which the lungs can flush out, crocidolite never dissolves and persists in the lungs for many years.

Through a series of experiments, the geologists tested whether crocidolite binds to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a protein receptor on the lung cell surface that initiates cell division. They found that crocidolite continually binds and unbinds with EGFR. When it does so, "crocidolite signals or triggers a potent response that may tell the cells to proliferate," says Lower. "This may help explain why cancer develops."

The geologists suspect that creating a small molecule that can coat crocidolite fibers may prevent the fibers from binding to EGFR, and thereby prevent the proliferation of cancer cells. Although the development of such a molecule probably is several years away, Taylor worked with chemist Roberto Lins at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, to develop supercomputer simulations to model the binding action of asbestos with EGFR. Understanding exactly how crocidolite attaches to EGFR could help the researchers tailor a molecule that would wedge between the two substances.

Lower and Taylor published their findings in Langmuir, and several more related papers are forthcoming. Lower is also pursuing similar work with carbon nanotubes. "They are very similar to asbestos, with their long, narrow shape, and a recent study suggests that nanotubes can trigger a similar pathogenic response as asbestos," he says. "There is some concern that nanotubes in manufacturing could be a cancer issue."

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Whileusing a camera-equipped robot to survey the environment under Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, paleoclimate researchers unexpectedly discovered a species of sea anemones that live in the ice.

The team of scientists and engineers, who are part of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program, reported that there were thousands upon thousands of the small anemones.

Though other sea anemones have been found in Antarctica, this species is the first reported ice dweller. While most sea anemones live on or in the seafloor, these anemones live upside down, burrowed in ice, their tentacles protruding into frigid water like flowers from a ceiling.

The white anemones have been named Edwardsiella andrillae, in honor of the ANDRILL Program.

Scott Borg, who heads the Antarctic Sciences Section in NSF's Division of Polar Programs, noted that the discovery illustrates how much remains both unknown and unexplored by scientists, even after more than 50 years of active U.S. research on the southernmost continent.

The discovery was "total serendipity," said Frank Rack, executive director of the ANDRILL Science Management Office at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "When we looked up at the bottom of the ice shelf, there they were."

Scientists had lowered the robot — a 4.5-foot cylinder equipped with two cameras — into a hole bored through the 270-meter-thick shelf of ice that extends over 600 miles northward from the grounding zone of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the Ross Sea.

Their mission was to provide environmental data for modeling the behavior of the ANDRILL drill string (a length of pipe extending through the water column and into the sea floor through which drilling fluids are circulated and core samples retrieved). They didn't expect to discover organisms in the ice, and surely not a new species.

The anemones measured less than an inch long in their contracted state — though they get three to four times longer in their relaxed state, researchers said. Each features 20 to 24 tentacles, an inner ring of eight longer tentacles and an outer ring of 12 to 16 tentacles.

Many mysteries remain about the creatures, such as how they burrow into hard ice, survive without freezing and how they reproduce. There is no evidence of what they eat, although they likely feed on plankton in the water flowing beneath the ice shelf, researchers said.

In addition to the anemones, the scientists saw fish that swam upside down, the ice shelf serving as the floor of their submarine world, as well as a bizarre little creature they dubbed "the eggroll," a four-inch-long cylinder that seemed to swim using appendages at both ends of its body.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Who do you call when your coral-reef neighborhood starts going downhill? The goby fish. These inch-long, biotic hedge trimmers enjoy nothing more than removing toxic algae from the knobby skyscraper villages erected by Acropora coral. Good thing, too. Without the gobies' compulsive cleaning, the alga commonly known as turtleweed can severely damage a coral reef through bleaching.

"The gobies are very defensive about their territory. They live in this coral their entire lives and feel like this is their house," says Mark Hay, a Georgia Institute of Technology biologist who studies the unique relationship shared by the gobies, algae and coral.

To learn more about just how the gobies defend their turf, Hay and fellow Georgia Tech biologist Danielle Dixson travel to Fiji, where a defunct dive shop serves as their home, lab and field office. Through a series of laboratory and underwater experiments, Hay and Dixson discovered that the gobies immediately respond to the coral when the turtleweed algae sweeps against it. The coral sends out a chemical that acts like a "911 call" to the gobies. The fish arrive and begin trimming away the seaweed. "It's the combination of the alga and coral together that the fish respond to," says Hay.

What's interesting about this interrelationship is that all involved are native to their habitat. "These are neighborhood players," says Hay. "The fish prefer to live in this species of coral and they know if it's their species being damaged. It's very finely tuned."

In the reef under study, just two species of goby fish take charge of removing the alga — the broad-barred goby (G. histrio) and the redhead goby (P. enchinocephalus). The scientists found that other fish leave the area when the coral comes into contact with the chemically noxious algae. And while both species trim the algae, the broad-barred goby actually consumes it. The turtleweed tidbits help boost the potency of the tiny gardener's own noxious mucus, which it uses to deter predators.

Because Hay and Dixson suspect that these types of behaviors may exist elsewhere, Dixson plans to travel to Australia in the near future to study other goby species in their coral habitats.

Knowing how widespread these behaviors are will help researchers protect Acropora coral. Thesecoral species are important because they form much of a reef's structure and provide a protective habitat for a myriad of other animals and plants.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A freshly brewed cuppa joe quickens the step and sets the mind a-glow. But that singular taste sensation is at risk because of a pinhead-sized beetle. Affecting coffee plants throughout the world, the coffee berry borer beetle (Hypothenemus hampei) destroys $500 million in crop yield annually when it burrows into coffee beans and lays eggs. In Columbia, the world's second biggest supplier of Arabica beans after Brazil, the problem is especially acute.

To help Cenicafe, Columbia's national coffee institute, devise a strategy to deal with the coffee-loving pests, Cornell University researcher Jocelyn Rose shared results from his research on how fruits soften. For that work, he and his colleagues developed gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and modeling tools to study the tomato secretome, an important component of the plant genome that contributes to processes ranging from fruit softening to disease resistance.

The same tools helped Rose and Cenicafe researchers identify a gene within the coffee beetle genome that encodes an enzyme called mannanase, which can digest the storage carbohydrates of coffee beans. What's unusual about the discovery is the mannanase gene appears to have originated from bacteria. This suggests that gene transfer occurred between non-similar organisms — from a bacterium to an animal.

"Finding the sequence was a surprise because a mannanase gene hadn't been found in an insect before," says Rose. "Although it was present in the beetle genome, the sequence had several hallmarks of a bacterial gene."

Non-sexual DNA movement between different species, termed horizontal gene transfer (HGT), is common among bacteria, but was previously considered rare between bacteria and eukaryotes (complex, multi-cellular organisms). However, Rose says "such transfer of genes is likely to be more common that we think."

In the case of the coffee beetle, HGT may result from evolutionary adaptation. The large-scale cultivation of a single crop such as coffee likely puts "huge pressure on organisms to adapt to the niche," says Rose. "Any minor opportunity is seized upon." For the beetle, the bacterial gene allows it to survive in a coffee-only environment.

During their studies, the researchers also identified genetic elements called transposons, or jumping genes, on either side of the transferred mannanase gene. Jumping genes move from one location in the genome to another and may, according to the researchers, have assisted in the transfer process.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This wild-looking video depicts a simulated thunderstorm spawning a tornado. The visualization illustrates how vorticity — which describes the spin of an air mass — aligns with the winds feeding into the storm to enhance storm rotation.

The visualization shows rotation in the updraft — the hallmark characteristic of a supercell, or rotating thunderstorm. In a real storm, you can see the clouds billowing upward and corkscrew striations in the rotating cloud, but the relationship between the wind and rotation isn't exactly clear. Plots like this help to illuminate this relationship, giving a better sense of how the vorticity in the environment is tilted, stretched and intensified in the updraft to make the storm rotate.

The animation reveals a vortex ring that develops as the strong updraft punches into the stable stratosphere and the air subsequently curls downward.

The visualization was created using VisIt, software developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and was computed on the Longhorn system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, based at The University of Texas at Austin. The original simulation was performed on the Kraken supercomputer at the National Institute for Computational Science. Both Longhorn and Kraken are National Science Foundation-funded systems.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Studies by researcher Nina Kraus have shown that lifelong musical training is associated with the ability to hear and understand sounds in a noisy environment, even as we age. But what about people who have had limited musical training — four or five years of piano or guitar lessons as a child, for example? A recent study by Kraus's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University suggests that even limited exposure to music may help inoculate us from some types of age-related declines in brain functioning. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that four to 14 years of musical training early in life is associated with faster neural timing in response to speech. Test subjects listened to a synthesized speech sound ("the syllable "da") by itself — without any other competing noise — and also amid other, background noises. She found that the group of test subjects who had had some musical training responded neurally to the syllable both in quiet and in noise more quickly than did the groups of test subjects without musical training. This result is relevant especially to older people, who often show difficulty processing fast-changing speech elements--consonant to vowel transitions, for example.

Other studies by Kraus have shown that musical training correlates to a better ability to pick out key sounds, such as spoken words, in noisy environments (see video), and a better ability to recognize the emotional content of sound.

Kraus is the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology at Northwestern University. Much of her research is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Related:

Fine-Tuned Brains

Musical Experience Benefits Brain Function

Report Says Musicians Hear Better Than Non-Musicians

Musicians Remember Better

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

In July 2012, marine biologist Paul Sikkel of Arkansas State University announced he had discovered a new coral reef crustacean, which he had named Gnathia marleyi, after the late Jamaican reggae artist Bob Marley. The news kicked off a media storm — drawing worldwide coverage from outlets including CBS News, the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, Fox News, NPR, the BBC and AFP. The story generated so much public interest (a rarity for taxonomy news), that it spawned a question on Jeopardy. Even People magazine named the discovery one of 2012's most intriguing things.

Most of the coverage was, to Sikkel's delight, positive. After all, Sikkel had named the "true natural wonder" for Marley because of his respect and admiration for Marley's music. Plus, he says, "Gnathia marleyi is as uniquely Caribbean as was Marley."

Parasites warrant our awe and deference, says Sikkel. They are among the most successful creatures on Earth — "biological champions" vital to coral reef ecology. In fact, parasites account for the majority of inhabitants of coral reefs, which are the world's most diverse ecosystems.

But, proving that beauty is in the mind of the beholder, some Marley fans objected to the association between Marley and his marine namesake. Why? Biological wonder though it may be, Gnathia marleyi is also a blood-sucking parasite. To detractors, this suggests a gamut of unflattering connotations.

The controversy over Gnathia marleyi has provided Sikkel with eye-opening perspectives. In the videos below, Sikkel talks with Amlak Tafari, the bassist for the Grammy-winning reggae band Steel Pulse and a self-described amBASSador, about naming Gnathia marleyi after Marley, the resulting controversy, the ecological importance of coral reefs and how both men are using the arts to educate people about scientific issues, including coral reef ecology.

More information:

• An NSF article and interview about how species are named is here.
• A profile of Sikkel is here.
• An article about Sikkel's research on the importance of parasites to coral reefs is here.
• An article about Sikkel's lively, creative teaching style (which incorporates Jimmy Buffet music) is here.
• Paul Sikkel's website is here.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Researchers spent one week aboard a scientific vessel in Lake Michigan, tracking a plume of fluorescent dye to better understand how currents transport marine organisms and contaminants such as spilled oil.

The five-member team from Purdue University conducted the research in July, aboard the National Science Foundation-supported research vessel Blue Heron. They worked in the middle of Lake Michigan — about 50 miles southeast of Milwaukee.

The Great Lakes lack the predictable regularity of tides; a combination of factors including winds, temperature and current depth influence currents. Combined, these factors cause a complex, spiraling water flow, producing a type of interior (rather than surface) waves called inertial waves.

The researchers hypothesize that the inertial waves are the primary mechanism governing the movement and dispersion of particles. "You can get currents as strong as a half-meter per second in the middle of Lake Michigan," Cary Troy of Purdue's School of Civil Engineering said prior to the study. "The effect is strongest in the middle of each of the Great Lakes, so that's why we are doing the research there."

"The goal is to do dye-release experiments and to track the dye patch over time to see where it diffuses and where it moves and to relate that to the information we have about the lake currents and waves," Troy said. "One obvious application is for something like an oil spill or any sort of contaminant spill in the Great Lakes. If you have a spill, you need to predict where it's going to go and how quickly it's going to dissipate."

Findings also could shed light on movement of organisms such as plankton and fish larvae. "Data will be used to improve computer models of how these things are circulated and transported in the Great Lakes," said Troy, who worked onboard with doctoral student Jun Choi, undergraduate David Cannon and two other students.

Research findings could apply to any of the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water.

Tow-Yo

The non-toxic dye, called Rhodamine WT, is initially bright pink and later turns blood red. The researchers tracked the movements of this dye using a fluorescence detector called a fluorometer. The Blue Heron towed the equipment and controlled it so that it undulated up and down, a technique called Tow-Yo. The up-and-down movement enabled researchers to create a 2D scan. Then, they tow-yoed in a grid pattern, providing a 3D view of the dye plume.

In addition to the fluorometer, the researchers used devices called drifters to track the dye. The buoylike drifters flow with currents, using underwater sails. They are equipped with global positioning systems and beam their locations to a satellite every 30 seconds.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

One of summer's most enjoyable treats is a big, juicy tomato. But consider this the next time you're in the garden: when you reach in to pluck that beefsteak off the vine yourself, you engage the plant's primary defense mechanism: A sharp, pungent aroma that is released whenever the hair cells on the tomato's leaves and stem are ruptured by any invader — whether it be human hand, a crawly insect or an oozy fungus.

Research teams led by Robert Last, Daniel Jones and Cornelius Barry of Michigan State University and Eran Pichersky of the University of Michigan recently determined how cultivated and wild varieties of tomatoes manufacture their protective chemical barrier: An enzyme known as Aacyltransferase2 (AT2) produces acyl sugars in the tips of the tomato's hair cells or other fine plant structures known as trichomes.

The researchers obtained these results by applying a combination of high-tech gene sequencing techniques and analytical chemistry to a collection of hand-picked wild tomato relatives from the Andes Mountains.

"We were especially fortunate to use the 80 accessions [genetically unique plant samples] of wild relatives collected by intrepid tomato scientists, most notably by [the late] Dr. Charles Rick from UC Davis," says Last. Rick undertook 15 expeditions to South America between 1948 and 1995 and collected 700 specimens of tomatoes native to the Andes regions of Peru, Ecuador, Chile and the Galapagos Islands.

The Andean collection allowed the researchers to study how the gene responsible for turning on AT2 production varies depending on a plant's geographic location. They found that wild tomatoes in northern locales lacked the ability to make defensive compounds, while varieties in southern regions continued to pump out the chemical barrier.

"In the north, the enzyme is not produced and the gene probably was inactivated multiple times," says Last. This suggests the AT2 production genes evolved and adapted as the wild tomato plants spread and encountered different environmental challenges. "Eventually genes die if they're not being used," Last explains. However, it appears that different pressures in the south caused the gene to actively protect the tomato from a variety of intruders.

This work and research through the NSF-funded Solanum Trichome Project will help agricultural planners devise new strategies to protect tomato crops. Extending our understanding of natural plant pesticides and the evolution of resistance to pests offers critical data for scientists as they breed and engineer plants to ensure a more durable existence.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A University of Colorado Boulder research team has moved closer to what some call the Holy Grail of a sustainable hydrogen economy — splitting water with sunlight.

The CU-Boulder team has devised a solar-thermal system designed to use a vast array of ground mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a single point atop a central tower up to several hundred feet tall. The tower would gather heat to roughly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,350 Celsius) and then deliver it into a reactor containing chemical compounds known as metal oxides.

As the metal oxide compound heats up, it releases oxygen atoms, changing its material composition and causing the newly formed compound to seek out new oxygen atoms. The team showed that adding steam to the system would cause oxygen from the water molecules to adhere to the metal oxide surface, freeing up hydrogen molecules for collection as hydrogen gas. To get the steam, the concentrated sunlight beamed to the tower would heat the water to boiling. [Hydrogen: Future of Fuels Finally Drives Up | Video]

Conventional theory holds that producing hydrogen through the metal oxide process requires 1) heating the reactor to a high temperature to remove oxygen 2) then cooling it to a low temperature before 3) injecting steam to re-oxidize the compound and release hydrogen gas for collection. The innovation here is that no swing in temperature is required. The whole process can be undertaken at the same temperature, and can be driven by turning a steam valve on or off.

With the new method, the amount of hydrogen produced to power fuel cells or for storage is entirely dependent on the amount of metal oxide (a combination of iron, cobalt, aluminum and oxygen), and how much steam is introduced into the system.

The researchers envision building reactor tubes roughly a foot in diameter and several feet long, filling them with the metal oxide material and stacking them on top of each other. A working system to produce a significant amount of hydrogen gas would require a number of the tall towers, each with its own reactor, to gather concentrated sunlight from several acres of mirrors surrounding each tower.

A paper on the National Science Foundation-funded research was published in the August 2 issue of Science.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Hydrological studies in the Rocky Mountains involving the tiny mountain pine beetle — a species of bark beetle — have big implications for water resource management in Colorado and elsewhere. A team of National Science Foundation-funded scientists is investigating how a rampant beetle infestation could change the quantity and quality of drinking water in Colorado.

Scientists say bark beetles have killed about 90 percent of Colorado's lodgepole pines — 4.5 million acres of trees. The loss of trees and tree canopy affects processes important to the water cycle, including the buildup and melting of the snowpack under trees. It also changes patterns in evapotranspiration (evaporation plus transpiration — a process by which plants take up water via their root systems and release it into the atmosphere as vapor).

In earlier years, cooler temperatures in fall and winter checked bark beetle populations in western North America. But with warming temperatures and trees weakened by drought, there have been massive outbreaks.

With so many dead trees available as fuel, forest fires are a concern. And so are changes to the quality of drinking water. Decomposing pine needles on the forest floor mix with runoff to create a "pine tree tea" — foul tasting and smelling. Scientists have found evidence that the fallen needles affect the natural chemical makeup of Colorado's drinking water, and these researchers continue to study the problem.

You can learn more about this environmental problem in a video the National Science Foundation created with NBC Learn, "Sustainability: Water — Dead Trees & Dirty Water in the Rockies." It is one of seven videos in a sustainability and water series released earlier this month.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Each year, more than 50,000 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, a degenerative disorder that attacks the central nervous system, causing tremors, rigidity, slowness of movement and loss of balance. Detecting it can be difficult, however, especially in early stages. Now, to detect and study neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, researchers have built a system that records signals from hand muscles during handwriting.

Motor neurons transmit electrical signals to muscles to make them contract. Electromyography (EMG) is a process that records and graphs such electrical activity to yield information about the condition of a subject's muscles and the nerve cells that control them. In the new detection system, a test subject attaches EMG surface electrodes to his or her hand and wears a glove to hold the electrodes in place. The subject then writes on a tablet, repeating simple, stereotyped hand movements that involve two basic motor components: firmly holding a pen by the fingers and moving the hand and the fingers to produce written text. The results are collected from both the tablet and the surface EMG electrodes.

An analytical program generates the result of muscle activity during this controlled set of movements and finds essential differences in the writing and writing behavior of patients with Parkinson's disease and older healthy control subjects. Thus a clinician would be able to detect and study neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.

The system developers included National Science Foundation-funded engineers at Norconnect, Inc., led by Norconnect chief scientist Michael Linderman.

Mark Latash, a professor of kinesiology at Penn State University who is not part of the research group, said the project appears to be a promising approach to helping physicians identify biomarkers of early Parkinson's disease.

Hans-Leo Teulings, CEO of NeuroScript, LLC in Temple, Az., an internationally renowned scientist and an author of an industry standard handwriting analysis device called MovAlyzeR, said the method of EMG analysis developed by Linderman will make the handwriting paradigm a valuable model and an object of scientific research similar to reflexes. Teulings did not participate in this research, but closely followed its progress for several years.

The new methodology for identifying Parkinson's disease biomarkers was published in several academic papers available on PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science) and was presented by Linderman at the 2013 Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease conference in Florence, Italy.

Emerging bio-medical devices acquire and process large amounts of data, said Boris Murmann, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. At the same time, they must typically operate from a battery. Therefore, design and optimization for low-energy consumption has become a major theme in these applications and the industry as a whole. Linderman provided an opportunity for students to conduct research in this important area, Murmann said.

Linderman collaborated with many U.S. universities and one high school, Ogdensburg Free Academy in Ogdensburg, N.Y. The pilot project and medical trials were conducted at Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center, Ogdensburg, N.Y. and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, N.H.

Read further: Recognition of Handwriting from Electromyography

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

To understand and predict large-scale environmental trends throughout the U.S., scientists must continuously collect standardized measurements of large U.S. ecosystems over many years. But because historically scientists lacked a mechanism to collect such measurements, the big picture on environmental trends in the U.S. has — to a large degree — remained elusive.

But that is now changing, with the development of the long-awaited National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Once it is fully operational, NEON (still under construction but partially operational) will be a massive nationwide infrastructure for collecting and synthesizing standardized ecological data covering the entire U.S. over multiple decades.

NEON will enable scientists to generate the first apples-to-apples comparisons of long-term ecosystem health throughout large regions of the U.S. and the entire country. It will thereby help scientists produce precedent-setting analyses of the long-term impacts of major environmental threats, such as climate change, land use changes and invasive species.

NEON functions will be turned on incrementally throughout the U.S. until the entire infrastructure becomes fully operational in about 2017. After that, NEON will remain fully functional for some 30 more years, until about 2047.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, NEON is managed by NEON, Inc., a nonprofit corporation based in Boulder, Colo.

NEON: An EKG for the environment

Researchers will use NEON to measure important ecological variables at 106 nationwide locations that were specially selected to represent the diversity of U.S. ecosystems. (You can see the schedule for construction of NEON's nationwide locations here.)

With its geographically dispersed data collection components, NEON will be analogous to an EKG for the Earth: Just as an EKG produces snapshots of heart health based on measurements of heart activity from strategic locations on a patient's body, NEON will produce snapshots of ecosystem health based on measurements from strategic locations throughout the U.S.

NEON will also be used to study the ecological impacts of selected extreme events in the U.S., such as fires, droughts and hurricanes. As part of this effort, NEON is currently collaborating with Colorado State University on a precedent-setting, large-scale study of the impact on vegetation, water quality and other natural resources of the High Park Fire in Colorado. This wildfire, which was among of the largest and most destructive wildfires in Colorado history, occurred in 2012.

In the coming years, additional data collection locations will be added to NEON to represent other extreme events.

Data Collection

At each NEON location, ecological variables — including pollution levels, land use, the diversity of plant and animal species, the health and types of vegetation and soil conditions — will be captured through 639 unique ecological measurements. This data will be collected in a variety of ways: by trained field crews; sensors placed in soils, perched in towers and lodged in streams; and state-of-the-art, ultra-sensitive remote sensing instrumentation in Twin Otter airplanes.

This kind of concerted measurement activity hasn't been done before. What's more, because researchers will take all NEON measurements using the same procedures, the data will be comparable across time and space. These data will therefore offer unparalleled topical, temporal and spatial coverage.

NEON data will be continuously and simultaneously beamed over the Internet to computational, modeling and other resources located at NEON, Inc., and then synthesized into various high-level data products. These products as well as raw NEON data will be made freely available via NEON's Web portal to one and all.

Uses of NEON data

Throughout NEON's lifetime, tens of thousands of researchers, educators, resource-managers, government organizations, students and members of the public will use its data. These users will incorporate NEON data into various types of analyses, including snapshots of the current state of the environment, as well as maps, explanations and predictions of the primary impacts of humans on the natural world.

Such resources will catapult forward the science of ecology as well as help improve public understanding of environmental change and promote science-based decision-making on natural resource issues.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A new educational, entertaining and inspirational film, Ordinary Extraordinary Junco: Remarkable Biology from a Backyard Bird, reveals just how much can be learned from the Junco — one of the most common and abundant, yet amazing and diverse, songbirds in North America.

Packaged with complementary educational resources and downloadable from a permanent web portal, this visually beautiful documentary may be shown in screenings or classes, particularly those at the high school and college level.

"Ordinary Extraordinary Junco should be shown in every high school biology classroom," said Jabin Burnworth, a science teacher at Manchester High School in Fort Wayne, Ind. "It is exactly how an educational film should be made."

The film is designed to appeal to conservation and wildlife organizations, researchers, families and individuals — particularly birdwatchers and science, nature and wildlife enthusiasts.

Joining researchers in the lab and field, Ordinary Extraordinary Junco highlights over 100 years of research on the juncos, one of North America's most beloved songbirds and a "star" research subject. Themes include evolution, ecology, animal behavior and the research process.

The film demonstrates that exciting biological processes, and even evolution, happen every day in your own backyard. Just as Darwin's finches in the Galapagos Islands and cichlid fish in Africa show rapid evolutionary diversification, so too does the most abundant and recognizable bird species of North America.

"Juncos are easily observable by millions of people daily," said Jonathan Atwell, a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University who teamed to make the film with distinguished professor of biology Ellen Ketterson. "So depending on where you are, chances are good that you can watch this film and then go see, or hear, a junco on your way to work or school.

"Surprisingly, there's not really a lot of decent quality film and video of this type that's developed to be scientifically accurate and developed with an educational mission," said Atwell. "Your typical wildlife nature 'Animal Planet' or 'Discovery Channel' kinds of programming can be engaging, but the flip side is the oversimplification of science and the anthropomorphic treatment of the animals."

Production of Ordinary Extraordinary Junco was partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

The 88-minute film is packaged in eight interconnected modules that can double as stand-alone instructional units on topics as broad as the scientific method, yet as refined as the role hormones play in the evolutionary development of vertebrate social behavior.

Ordinary Extraordinary Junco can be viewed online in its entirety or in any combination of its eight modules, and used with accompanying teaching guides, study questions for students, links to relevant scientific literature and other educational materials.

During production, the film's creators took into account both the National Science Education Standards of the National Research Council and standards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Benchmarks in Science. The producers will update the films following finalization of the Next Generation Science Standards, currently in development.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

This well-preserved fossilized tree hopper, flanked by two fossil crane flies, is one specimen from of an extraordinary fossil collection donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History by an amateur paleontologist between 1992 and 2003.

The collection from citizen scientist and Colorado resident David Kohls is helping scientists in the museum's Department of Paleobiology (LINK) as well as visiting researchers gain exciting new insights into insect evolution, feeding strategies and ecology. Thanks to Kohls, these scientists have access to more than 120,000 fossils preserved in lake sediments about 48 million years ago — insects, spiders, leaves, flowers and small vertebrates.

The Department's recently launched blog, Digging the Fossil Record, describes the value of the "Green River" collection:

"The insect collection features superb preservation; color differences, body hair patterns, delicate mouthpart details, eye facets and even male and female genitalia can be discerned. The insects represent 18 orders (major taxonomic groups), and, because Kohls didn't favor one type of insect over others, his collection is one of the few unbiased representations of abundant, fossil insect assemblages in the world. This makes it ideal for ecological research."

Read more about the Green River Collections at the Smithsonian and check out the fascinating new blog from the Department of Paleobiology, Digging the Fossil Record.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

New research shows that a signal species of fish in the Gulf Coast was harmed by exposure to crude oil toxins nearly a year after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster occurred.

Using wire minnow traps, the researchers — from Louisiana State University, Clemson University and the University of California, Davis — collected Gulf killifish (Fundulus grandis) from oil-contaminated Grande Terre, La., and from reference sites in Mississippi and Alabama — sites that were not contaminated — during four trips between May 2010 and August 2011.

Analyses of the Grande Terre fish revealed abnormal gene expression in their liver and gill tissues. Furthermore, embryos that were exposed in the lab to Grande Terre sediments failed to hatch or were smaller and showed "poor vigor." The embryos also suffered edema, or excessive fluid buildup, around the heart and in the yolk sac.

Killifish are useful as study subjects because they don't migrate, making them good indicators of the effects of toxins in their environment. Other species that share similar habitats with the Gulf killifish are redfish, speckled trout, flounder, blue crabs, shrimp and oyster.

"These effects are characteristic of crude oil toxicity," said co-author Andrew Whitehead, an assistant professor of environmental toxicology at UC Davis. "It's important that we observe it in the context of the Deepwater Horizon spill because it tells us it is far too early to say the effects of the oil spill are known and inconsequential. By definition, effects on reproduction and development — effects that could impact populations — can take time to emerge." But he also noted that oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill showed up in patches without coating the coastline. That means some killifish may have been less impacted.

The National Science Foundation-supported paper was posted online before its publication in Environmental Science and Technology.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is the largest recorded in history, resulting in an estimated 210 million gallons of crude oil spilled.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Taking up the fight against bed bugs, research scientists have looked to old European folk practice — kidney bean leaves. First, they identified precisely how the leaves trap the bugs and then they created synthetic leaf traps, or biomimetic plastic surfaces.

Traditionally in Bulgaria, Serbia and other southeast European countries, households with infestations of bed bugs have thwarted the evasive little bloodsuckers by strewing kidney bean leaves on the floor at night. In the morning, the bed-bug-studded leaves are swept up and burned in piles.

This method was documented scientifically in the 1940s. But World War II interrupted that line of inquiry and, with the advent of the pesticide DDT, bed bugs became less of a problem in many places.

But, as many people are aware, the 1990s saw the beginnings of a bed bug resurgence in cities all around the world and the parasites remain a growing problem. Hotels, motels, airports, movie theaters, hospitals and many more public and private spaces have been affected. What's worse, the bugs demonstrate increasing pesticide resistance.

Entomologist Catherine Loudon and her colleagues at University of California, Irvine, with fellow researchers at the University of Kentucky used videography and scanning electron microscopy to investigate the possibility of creating synthetic leaf traps as a sustainable and nontoxic effective solution.

After tipping the bugs out of vials onto the underside of kidney bean leaves, the scientists found that tiny sharp-edged hairs known as trichomes actually impaled the bugs' feet. "When you put a bed bug on a bean leaf, and it takes a few steps — and this actually happens fairly rapidly, I was rather astonished — . . . it starts to struggle," Loudon said on public radio program As It Happens. The leaf acts "like a little, tiny, miniature fish hook," she said.

The scientists then fabricated surfaces out of plastic that are similar to the leaf surfaces — "geometrically indistinguishable," Loudon said.

Unfortunately, these biomimetic surfaces don't do the trick quite yet--they snag the bugs but don't trap them. "As yet we have not been able to replicate all of the necessary mechanical properties of the microscopic bean leaf trichomes in our synthetic surfaces," Loudon said.

In the published study, the scientists explained that the trichomes they fabricated may not be bending or twisting in the precise way needed to pierce the bugs' feet and hold them. " ... [T]he tip of a more flexible hollow natural trichome could more readily skitter along the cuticle of a bug's surface until the sharp point ended up in a crevice or pit, leading to piercing, while a stiffer solid synthetic trichome may simply bend away," they wrote.

The researchers are working on modifications that will address these issues.

"Hopefully," Loudon said, "this technology could help relieve some of the problems that the burgeoning pesticide-resistant bed bug populations are causing internationally. It's a horrible problem and it's causing a lot of distress — financial, social, psychological — for a large number of people."

Doctoral student Megan Szyndler, Loudon and chemist Robert Corn of UC Irvine and entomologists Kenneth Haynes and Michael Potter of the University of Kentucky collaborated on the study.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

At a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society, scientists announced a potential new biofuels source — anaerobic gut fungus (yeast) found in horses' waste and digestive tracts. This news is exciting because the fungus makes enzymes that digest lignin — a protective barrier inside plant cell walls that is hard to separate from cellulose. In terms of biofuel production, cellulose is the good stuff — the raw materials enzymes break down into sugars for fermentation.

Treating lignin has been an expensive part of biofuels production. "Nature has made it very difficult and expensive to access the cellulose in plants," said Michelle A. O'Malley of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "Additionally, we need to find the best enzyme mixture to convert that cellulose into sugar," she said.

"We have discovered a fungus from the digestive tract of a horse that addresses both issues — it thrives on lignin-rich plants and converts these materials into sugars for the animal. It is a potential treasure trove of enzymes for solving this problem and reducing the cost of biofuels." The scientists hope to take the genes that produce such enzymes from gut fungi and genetically engineer them into yeasts.

O'Malley's research group collaborated with researchers at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. They identified all the genetic material that the horse gut fungus uses to make enzymes and other proteins. This collection of protein-encoding material — the "transcriptome" —led to the identification of hundreds of enzymes that can break through lignin. The team now is looking for the most active enzyme and developing ways to transfer that enzyme's genetic machinery into yeast that is already used in industrial processes (to manufacture drugs and other goods).

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Researcher Joseph Bahlman, a graduate student at Brown University, developed the robotic bat wing depicted in this video to help scientists better understand the workings of bat flight. "Bats are just really amazing, spectacular flyers," says Bahlman, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. "Their wings are extremely dynamic, so much more dynamic than birds or insects. If you look at the wings of a bat, they're just like our hands, they have all these joints that let their wings adapt into lots of different shapes, giving them a tremendous range of aerodynamic forces and maneuverabilities. They fly much better than anything we've engineered. I would love to figure out how that works and then duplicate it."

Bahlman's research, conducted in the labs of Brown professors and bat flight experts Kenneth Breuer and Sharon Swartz, could offer insights that aid the design of small aircraft, among other applications. The work has received funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and NSF.

Early studies with the robotic flapper, described in a paper published in February in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, showed that when bats fold their wings in flight, they are in effect reducing drag. With the down stroke of a wing during flight, the body moves up, but the subsequent upstroke can counter that force. Wing folding addresses that problem, making flight more efficient.

Brown University's "ro-bat" mimics the shape and motion of the wing of the lesser dog-faced fruit bat, a species found in abundance in South and Southeast Asia.

More about bats:

Batty for Bats

The Night Life: Why We Need Bats All the Time--Not Just on Halloween

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

For five summers, College of William & Mary students such as Allison Oldham participated in the school's recently ended Computational Science Training for Undergraduates in the Mathematical Sciences (CSUMS) program, which paired students with scientists to develop hands-on research experiences.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, CSUMS provided dozens of math students with opportunities to participate in research and attend lectures on interdisciplinary topics. In addition, the program taught the students about the practical nuts-and-bolts of pursuing math careers by enabling them to travel off campus to sites where researchers use math on a daily basis.

Programs that introduce young mathematicians to real-world research have strategic importance as well as educational benefits, said Dennis Manos, vice provost for research at William & Mary. "U.S. success in science and technology was built on the capability of our mathematicians," he said. "This success has been at the heart of our economic leadership, increasing productivity to yield high return on investment. CSUMS placed young mathematicians into research experiences that reflect the actual future problems they will be asked to solve. So programs like CSUMS need to survive budget tightening so U.S. technical leadership can build wealth for the next generation."

Chi-Kwong Li, Ferguson Professor of Mathematics at William & Mary, said that CSUMS introduced students to a number of fields, such as computational biology and neurophysiology, that are becoming more and more dependent on mathematics.

The five-year CSUMS program at William & Mary ended in 2012, but leaves an impressive legacy. Li said that from the program's inception in 2007, CSUMS students and their mentors produced 20 research papers. Interest in math courses, as well as research, skyrocketed. Additionally, more than half of all CSUMS participants continued on to graduate school in math or science after completing their undergraduate degrees.

Oldham, a senior at William & Mary, said her experience with CSUMS, which focused on graph theory, helped guide her career path. She said she had many chances to practice mathematical writing, present projects to peers and attend mathematics conferences — opportunities not usually offered in an undergraduate classroom setting.

"Mathematics research and mathematics classwork are so different, and it's so important to experience both," said Oldham, adding that the research experience through CSUMS will give her a major advantage in graduate school applications.

Editors' Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Astronomers have developed a new way to detect chemical processes that take place on extrasolar planets, a technique that could one day help us find distant planets capable of sustaining life.

The new approach refines earlier attempts to deduce the chemical composition of an extrasolar planet's atmosphere — or surface, if there is no cloud cover — by first separating the light from the planet from that of its host star with set of new complex imaging tools. Then the light is divided into a spectrum.

The field of spectroscopy takes advantage of the fact that light waves reveal characteristic clues about their sources and the gases they have passed through. Applied to extrasolar planets, when light waves emanate from a warm orbiting planet, the light waves interact with the any molecules they hit — such as water or methane in the clouds of a gaseous planet. The light then re-emits into space, altered by the interaction.

Because chemicals absorb characteristic combinations of light wavelengths, they leave spectral "fingerprints," from which astronomers can deduce the chemicals present on even distant objects in the sky.

Such techniques are common for studying the chemistry of our own planet's atmosphere, or planets, asteroids and comets within our solar system.

However, light coming from distant solar systems is dominated by light from the host star, or stars, around which extrasolar planets orbit.

To get around that obstacle, researchers with the NSF-supported Project 1640, led by astronomer Ben Oppenheimer, associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, have developed a technique to block much of the light coming from a distant star while simultaneously isolating the light emitted by each of its orbiting planets — or, at least those planets that current telescopes can detect. The effort, supported by NSF, NASA and the Plymouth Hill Foundation, recently was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. Additional funding sources for Project 1640 are listed here.

"Through this effort, astronomers are now able to monitor cloudy skies on extrasolar planets, and for the first time, they have made such observations for four planets at once," says Maria Womack, a program officer at National Science Foundation who has helped fund the research. "This new ability enables astronomers to now make comparisons as they track atmospheres, and maybe even weather patterns, on the planets."

Using the new technique, Oppenheimer and his colleagues detected unexpected chemistry for four planets orbiting the star HR 8799, which lies 128 light years from Earth. If these initial findings hold firm, the data suggest that the planets, to varying degrees, have either some ammonia or some methane, an unusual finding since both chemicals are expected to be present together in planets that are of the same temperature (1340 degrees Fahrenheit) as those orbiting HR 8799. Additionally, the scientists may have detected acetylene, which no one had yet seen on an extrasolar planet.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego have built a small fleet of portable pollution sensors with which users can monitor air quality in real time — on their smart phones.

The sensors which are called CitiSense, may be particularly useful to people who suffer from chronic conditions, such as asthma, and must avoid exposure to pollutants.

Data from the sensors may be used to estimate air quality throughout the area where the devices are deployed — not just within a localized space.The goal is a wireless network in which hundreds or thousands of small environmental sensors carried by the public rely on cell phones to shuttle information to central computers where it will be analyzed, anonymized and shared with individuals, public health agencies and cities at large.

Just 100 of the sensors deployed in a fairly large area could generate a wealth of data — well beyond what a small number of EPA-mandated air-quality monitoring stations can provide. For example, San Diego County has 3.1 million residents, 4,000 square miles — and only about 10 stations.

"We want to get more data and better data, which we can provide to the public,"said William Griswold, a computer science professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and the lead investigator on the project. "We are making the invisible visible."

The CitiSense sensors detect ozone, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, the most common pollutants emitted by cars and trucks. The user interface displays the sensor's readings on a smart phone by using a color-coded scale for air quality based on the EPA's air quality ratings, from green (good) to purple (hazardous).

Researchers provided the sensors for four weeks to 30 users, including commuters at UC San Diego and faculty, students and staff members in the computer science department at the Jacobs School of Engineering. Computer scientists presented findings from these field tests at the Wireless Health 2012 conference in San Diego earlier this year.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

For thousands of years, Chinese herbalists have treated malaria using Chang Shan, a root extract from a type of hydrangea that grows in Tibet and Nepal. Recent studies have suggested Chang Shan can also reduce scar formation, treat multiple sclerosis and even slow cancer progression.  

Researchers have suspected that the herbal extract's power to mitigate the effects of malaria stems from febrifugine, the extract's active ingredient. Using halofuginone, a widely studied compound derived from febrifugine, two research teams have helped explain how the extract works. Their findings suggest ways to harness the herbal remedy to treat a host of medical conditions. 

Understanding Molecular Changes

To discover the extract's molecular secrets, Harvard School of Dental Medicine researchers and international collaboratorsfocused on themolecular changes triggered by halofuginone. Over the years, they've learned that halofuginone activates a stress-response pathway that blocks the production of a harmful class of immune cells, called Th17 cells. These cells have been implicated in many autoimmune disorders, including inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis.  

Most recently, the international team showed that halofuginone restricted the activity of a key enzyme involved in making proteins. Blocking the enzyme kick-started the stress-response pathway, thereby clamping down on the production of TH17 cells and other types of cells involved in inflammation. These findings help explain halofuginone's wide range of therapeutic effects and suggest that the compound could be a useful tool for studying an important molecular process. 

Understanding Molecular Binding

The other study, conducted by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, focused on how halofuginone binds to its target enzyme. Studies revealed that the compound latches on to and blocks the business end of the enzyme with a "two-handed" grip. In an unusual twist, the researchers discovered that ATP (adenosine triphosphate), a molecule needed for the enzyme to function normally, enables the binding. These details of the herbal compound bound to the enzyme and ATP suggests the medicine's structure could be a useful model in designing drugs to treat numerous other diseases.  

Together, these findings point to the power of basic research to reveal new insights into biological processes and new directions for the development of medicines.  

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health. To see more images and videos of basic biomedical research in action, visit NIH's Biomedical Beat Cool Image Gallery.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Electromagnetic signals are a double-edged sword for our health. On the one hand, these signals — a form of energy involved in many types of communication — make possible important and potentially life-saving medical treatments, including pacemakers, sensors that monitor vital signs, anti-tumor therapies and trans-cranial magnetic brain stimulation, to name just a few.

On the other hand, there is growing concern over the potentially negative impacts on the human body of electromagnetic signals emitted by increasingly ubiquitous sources such as cell phones, power lines and magnetic resonance imaging equipment. Biomedical researchers are giving increasing attention to this field of inquiry, which in turn can spark student interest in careers in electrical engineering, biomedical engineering and applied electromagnetics.

To study the impacts of electromagnetic signals on the human body, students and researchers simulate interactions between electronic technologies and realistic, high-fidelity models of the human body, known as "meshes." The meshes consist of digitized representations of living, and possibly even moving, tissues, including the body's inner organs, bones and other tissues.

To support studies of the impacts of electromagnetic waves on the human body, NEVA Electromagnetics, LLC produces meshes and various computational tools, including a new tool compatible with MATLABÒ — a high-level programming language for numerical computation and visualization; it is commonly available at academic institutions.

NEVA's tools have numerous applications. They can be used to help simulate electrostatic and quasi-electrostatic simulations, to model human body capacitance (ability to store electrical charges), capacitive touchpads and touchscreens, human exposure to electric fields and trans-cranial stimulation with electrodes or pulsing coils. In addition, electrodynamic simulations can be used to model antenna radiation close to the body, radio-frequency sensors and body-area sensor networks.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Like humans, phytoplankton (tiny plants that drift on ocean currents) need iron to survive. Normally, though, iron is in short supply in the ocean. But a recent study funded by the National Science Foundation suggests that over the last 1 million years, periodic increases in iron — which mainly reaches the open ocean in the form of windblown dust — have caused spikes in phytoplankton numbers.

Why study changes in phytoplankton abundance? Because increases in phytoplankton populations may impact global climate. Here's how: Phytoplankton consume carbon near the surface of the ocean through photosynthesis. Because the upper ocean and the atmosphere are closely connected through chemical exchanges, more carbon consumed in the ocean may mean less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Therefore, increases in phytoplankton populations may slow global warming or even contribute to global cooling.

Although a direct effect on climate by phytoplankton has yet to be confirmed, the new study supports the Iron Hypothesis, an idea developed over 20 years ago by marine scientist John Martin. Martin argued that when the Earth goes through dry, dusty climate periods, more iron reaches the ocean in the form of windblown dust, which acts like a fertilizer for phytoplankton. As the phytoplankton become more numerous, they draw down carbon from the atmosphere, thereby helping to cool the planet.

Other research has supported a link between iron and phytoplankton in the present-day ocean, but this latest study provides a unique look back in time.

To investigate the long-term influence of iron on phytoplankton, Richard Murray of Boston University and a multi-institution team of scientists studied prehistoric sediments buried in the seafloor. They found that as iron levels periodically increased and decreased over time, so too did levels of opal — a material many people associate with jewelry, but which marine scientists use as an indicator of phytoplankton abundance.

Opal indicates phytoplankton abundance because it is secreted by diatoms as material to form diatom shells. Diatoms are among the most common and important kinds of phytoplankton. As the abundance of diatoms changes over time, these changes are reflected in the amounts of opal (dead diatom shell) that settles on the seafloor and eventually is buried by marine sediment. By tracking opal and iron in the sedimentary record, Murray and his team were able to show that the relationship between phytoplankton and iron is long-standing, even ancient.

In the diagram accompanying this article, iron (Fe, in red) and opal from phytoplankton shells (in blue) are closely linked in seafloor sediments over the past 1 million years. Numbers on the horizontal axis represent the number of years before present. Numbers on the vertical axes represent the rate at which opal and iron have accumulated and been buried in the seafloor, in units of milligrams per square centimeter per thousand years (mg/cm²/kyr).

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

With an overall mortality rate of 40-60 percent, severe sepsis and septic shock represent major threats to people today. In fact they are among the leading causes of acute renal failure and death in intensive care units. (In sepsis, the body responds to infection with extreme inflammation; the condition is sometimes called “blood poisoning.”)

Cytokines are small protein molecules, only a few nanometers in size, which are known to be released in excessive amounts as sepsis progresses. We know that nonspecific extracorporeal removal of cytokines (filtration similar to dialysis) is a useful approach that can save lives, providing time needed for antibiotics and other drugs to treat the inflammatory process that caused sepsis.

For highly efficient removal of cytokines from the blood, it is imperative to design the best possible filtration materials, and carbon materials are prime candidates for this task due to their compatibility with blood plasma. Only highly tunable nanoporous materials can be manipulated to match the pore size to the cytokine molecule size and to obtain optimized adsorption performance.

We recognized the excellent adsorption properties of mesoporous carbons that we derived from silicon carbide-based ceramics.  Our international team of researchers and scientists, with support from the National Science Foundation, used heat and chemical treatments to transform these into pure carbon materials with pores on the scale of nanometers. Using ceramics produced from polymer precursors, we can manufacture carbon powder for cytokine adsorption or make monolithic filtration devices (e.g., tubes). We described these results in the cover article published in the November 2012 issue of Advanced Healthcare Materials.

In the image here, you see an artistic illustration of a carbide-derived nanoporous carbon and interleukin-6, which is both a pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine.

The broader goal of the NSF project was to develop novel materials for protein sorption and to improve the understanding of protein sorption mechanism. This research is being carried out in collaboration with the groups of Prof. S. Mikhalovsky, University of Brighton in the United Kingdom and Prov. P. Colombo, Padova University in Italy.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Just as images of galaxies reveal new details about space, this image of a nucleus reveals new details about the cell. The green and yellow dots mark the position of telomeres, caps on the ends of each chromosome. Until recently, scientists thought that the main job of telomeres was to keep chromosomes from fraying. New research that shows telomeres moving to the outer edge of the nucleus suggests that these caps also may play a role in organizing DNA after cells divide.

Telomeres are repeats of the same sequence of DNA building blocks. In people, telomeres consist of the sequence TTAGGG repeated approximately 2,000 times. An enzyme called telomerase adds more of the TTAGGG sequence to chromosome ends, helping the telomeres maintain their length. This is important in a growing fetus, for example, where cells are dividing rapidly.

Most adult body cells, however, keep telomerase tightly controlled and not very active. As this happens, telomeres eventually shorten. When they have shrunk to a certain length, the cells can go into retirement and stop dividing. Cancer cells, on the other hand, often increase their levels of telomerase so they can divide indefinitely.

Wanting to better understand the role of telomeres during cell division and other parts of the cell cycle, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies tracked telomere movement in real-time. They labeled telomeres in living human cells with molecules that glowed and then used advanced time-lapse live-cell microscopy to follow the movement for at least 20 hours. The results showed that telomeres move to the periphery of the cell's nucleus following cell division. Two proteins seem to tether the telomeres there.

While the implications of this spatial relocation are not yet clear, the researchers suspect that the repositioned telomeres may serve as anchor points for reorganizing chromosomes and regulating gene expression after cells have duplicated. They also hypothesize that the process might play a role in maintaining telomeres. The scientists plan to explore these possibilities in future experiments.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health. To see more images and videos of basic biomedical research in action, visit NIH's Biomedical Beat Cool Image Gallery.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A new type of ‘4-D’ transistor could represent a big advance for the semiconductor industry. The transistor contains three nanowires made from indium-gallium-arsenide (InGaAs), as opposed to silicon. The three nanowires are progressively smaller, resulting in a cross-section that is shaped like a Christmas tree.

InGaAs is a semiconductor made of indium, gallium and arsenic, and is being investigated as an alternative to silicon that could allow for smaller transistors.

The NSF-funded researchers built on previous work in which researchers created 3-D instead of flat transistors. Their approach could lead to faster, more compact and efficient integrated circuits and lighter laptops that generate less heat.

The researchers from Purdue and Harvard universities showed how to improve device performance by linking 3-D transistors vertically in parallel. "A one-story house can hold so many people but, more floors, more people; and it's the same thing with transistors," said Peide "Peter" Ye, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue. "Stacking them results in more current and much faster operation for high-speed computing. This adds a whole new dimension, so I call them 4-D."

The work is led by Purdue doctoral student Jiangjiang Gu and Harvard postdoctoral researcher Xinwei Wang.

 Read Purdue’s article here.

Editor's Note:

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The wood products industry, which is vital to the upper Midwest economy, has been hurt by plant closures and cutbacks. Several bright spots on the horizon: an uptick in housing starts and an increased demand for engineered wood products. Also, the Natural Resources Research Institute is using a European technology involving a thermal modification kiln to improve the marketability of Midwest wood species.

The process makes trees species like aspen, red pine and basswood usable for products that today are made from western trees such as ponderosa pine. With funding from the National Science Foundation, NRRI is investigating the use of thermal modification techniques to improve the durability of engineered wood products such as cross-laminated timbers and plywood. The pilot-scale kiln will make it possible to collect data and validate the process to build the market for this improved wood.

The technology is a special heat technique that results in high-performing wood products. After modification, the wood is moisture resistant, with decreased swelling and shrinkage in humid indoor and outdoor applications. It is also more resistant to rot-inducing fungi.

“Our goal is to see regional wood species being used to make a new class of high-performance engineered wood products that excel in demanding environmental conditions,” said Matt Aro, NRRI’s lead researcher on this project. “We’d put more local loggers and truckers to work hauling wood to the manufacturing plants, which would help our critical forest products industry, much of which has a rural base, get back on track.”

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The BigFoot software package, which can be easily downloaded and used by the public and by medical professionals in clinical settings, utilizes a scanner as an image-capture device, with patients placing their feet directly on the scanner's surface. The software's custom-designed set of algorithms then manages and analyzes the acquired foot-image data.

Various medical conditions, including diabetes, can manifest themselves as visible features on the human skin.

Effective monitoring of these superficial features can be of utmost importance as an indirect, and sometimes direct, method of tracking the progression of the underlying medical condition. Diabetes, especially in elderly individuals, can lead to significant visible damage on the surface of the skin, particularly the feet, and may lead to ulcers. Yet patients are not always aware of the extent, or even the existence, of the damage. Many times, they find out about it only through visual inspections during a visit to a doctor's office or point-of-care clinic. However, since such medical visits may not occur frequently enough — something that is especially true in geographical settings where medical resources are limited — significant damage can go undetected and untreated for long periods. Severe cases can necessitate the amputation of the foot.

These issues highlight the need for BigFoot for the monitoring, tracking and sharing of the condition of the feet or other human appendages at home or in point-of-care offices.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Ever wondered how animals and plants can survive in sub-zero temperatures?

Natural compounds in these organisms can interact with the surfaces of ice crystals to slow freezing. With Nature as a source of inspiration, chemists at New York University have discovered synthetic molecules that can exhibit a similar ‘antifreeze’ effect.

Using microscopy and X-ray diffraction to observe the behavior of ice crystals, the scientists discovered that those peptide-mimetic compounds — aka “peptoids” — inhibit the growth of ice crystals and alter their melting temperature.

The antifreeze effects exhibited by those molecules are highly dependent on the details of their chemical structure. The antifreeze effects exerted by the new synthetic molecules may prove capable of freezing biological samples without damage, allowing long-term preservation of human cells or tissues.

Read more in the NYU announcement here.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The Velella Project Beta-trial tested the world's first open-ocean, unanchored fish farm — a drifting "Aquapod" fish pen entrained in eddies in the lee of the Big Island of Hawaii.

The heart of the NSF-funded trial was a net pen, an Ocean Farm Technologies Aquapod®. Approximately 22 feet across, this synthetic lumber geodesic sphere had ballast tanks fore and aft, and an experimental copper alloy mesh intended to reduce biofouling (the accumulation of macroalgae and marine fauna that can restrict water exchange through the mesh, which may compromise fish health).

After constructing the pen, the crew used a crane to put the Aquapod into the water and suspend it at the surface on a tripod of large lift bags. This would ease the tow by reducing the amount of material below the surface exerting drag.

The pod was tethered to the 65-foot steel schooner S/V Machias, and towed out of port towards the operating area West of Hawaii Island. Machias would serve as the farm tender vessel, as well as a floating home, workshop and research platform for the next 8 months.

When the Aquapod reached the operating area, the lift bags were removed, and the ballast tanks flooded. A string of floats reaching up to the surface maintained the pen's depth.

After deployment, the crew began a one-month sea trial to ensure that the vessel-pen array was robust and fully operational.

The sea trial period was successful and in July 2011, the crew stocked the cage with about 2000 kampachi fingerlings. The kampachi quickly adapted to their new home and began to grow rapidly.

Divers monitored twice-daily feedings, to ensure that no excess feed was wasted or deposited outside the pen.

The open ocean West of Hawaii Island provided the ideal environment for the trial — high water quality, good visibility, and (relatively) stable current regimes. The Velella array, like all structures floating in the open ocean, rapidly became an oasis of life in a largely empty 'blue desert'. And the cultured kampachi thrived in the offshore environment, with high survival (98%) and excellent growth.

The Velella-grown kampachi reached harvest size (2kg) in only 5 months of grow-out operations, approximately half the expected amount of time. The last Velella kampachi were harvested out in February 2012, bringing the offshore research project to a successful conclusion.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

About the size of toenail clippings, planarians are freshwater flatworms that can re-form from tiny slivers. This feature not only lets them repair themselves, but it lets them reproduce by breaking apart and then creating new worms.   

Here are two other important features: More than half of planarian genes have parallels in people, and some of their basic physiological systems operate like ours. By studying how these features behave as the worms regenerate, scientists might move one step closer to learning how to generate or regenerate human tissue and cells, such as insulin-producing cells for people with diabetes or nerve cells for patients with spinal cord injuries.

The picture on the left shows a cell colony grown from a single planarian stem cell, which, like a human embryonic stem cell, has the potential to become many different cell types. Here, the cells labeled red will create more stem cells like themselves, and the cells labeled blue will make functional flatworm tissue like muscle and skin. Scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research inhibited certain planarian genes and then studied how the colonies changed.

The researchers were able to quantify the results, and, from what they learned, implicate the genes responsible for cell renewal and those spurring the creation of different cell types. They hope to use this knowledge to pinpoint parallels in mammals, perhaps one day harnessing the regenerative power of human embryonic stem cells.

The other image shows a cross-section of a flatworm. The green clusters and magenta specks throughout the planarian are specialized structures that push waste toward the animal’s bile ducts. These organs, which comprise the animal’s excretory system, are like our kidneys, in that the structures are lined with cells and the ducts employ comparable filtration methods. One key difference, though, is that flatworms can regenerate their excretory systems from next to nothing.

To better understand how this regeneration happens, researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research removed the heads from planarians and watched as the creatures regrew the missing body part, including tubular structures of the excretory system. Among other findings, they learned that interfering with the expression of one gene kept the tubules and pores from branching off a precursor structure and from re-forming. This suggests the gene plays a critical role in regeneration. Studying similar genes in mammals could shed light on how we maintain our kidneys — and might grow new ones.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health. To see more images and videos of basic biomedical research in action, visit NIH's Biomedical Beat Cool Image Gallery.

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.