Monthly Archives: December 2009
Retaining walls shaken in test, but not broken
UC Davis civil engineering professor Dawn Cheng recently carried out a series of tests at UC San Diego’s Englekirk Structural Engineering Center. The center has the largest outdoor shake table in the world — meaning that you can build a …
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Virtual Reality demos at AGU
If you are among the 16,000 people attending the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week, scientists from the UC Davis KeckCAVES facility will be running several demonstrations of their interactive virtual reality technology. The demonstrations will be …
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Water Myths and Reality in California
It has been said that all politics in California is ultimately about water. With almost everyone in the state, from farmers to fishermen to urbanites who want clean drinking water, having a stake in the issue, opinions and allegations about …
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Scientists at work III: Antarctica
It’s been a few weeks since we checked on UC Davis geology professor Dawn Sumner and postdoc Bekah Shepard, who are spending several weeks by an Antarctic lake investigating strange microbes that are something like the earliest life on Earth. …
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Scientists at work II: Brain slicing at UCSD
While physicists at CERN are living on coffee and adrenaline, neuroscientists at UC San Diego are engaged in a patient, painstaking procedure: over several days, they have been slicing the brain of HM, an amnesic patient who died in December …
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Scientists at work I: Large Hadron Collider
Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have already had their first paper accepted for publication. In nine days, from collecting data to acceptance, which makes the pace of publication in other disciplines look not so much glacial as geological. This …
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