A team of physicians and laboratory scientists has taken a key step toward a cure for sickle cell disease, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to fix the mutated gene responsible for the disease in stem cells from the blood of affected patients. For the first time, they have corrected the mutation in a proportion of stem […]

Utah’s iconic Rainbow Bridge hums with natural and man-made vibrations, according to a new University of Utah study, published September 21 in Geophysical Research Letters. The study characterizes the different ways the bridge vibrates and what frequencies and energy sources cause the rock structure to resonate. The vibrations are small, according to geology and geophysics […]

Sept. 12, 2016— Loss of megaherbivores such as elephants and hippos can allow woody plants and non-grassy herbs and flowering plants to encroach on grasslands in African national parks, according to a new University of Utah study, published September 12 in Scientific Reports. The study used isotopes in hippopotamus teeth to find a shift in […]

University of Utah researchers have found that the structure of an insulin molecule produced by predatory cone snails may be an improvement over current fast-acting therapeutic insulin. The finding suggests that the cone snail insulin, produced by the snails to stun their prey, could begin working in as few as five minutes, compared with 15 […]

A leading cause of vision loss in children is amblyopia, or lazy eye, and video game developers from the University of Utah have come up with a way to not only diagnose but to treat the disorder. In 2015, U students Ahmad Alsaleem, Ahmad Nassari and Daniel Blair from Entertainment Arts & Engineering won a […]

University of Utah ecologist Nalini Nadkarni is no fashion mogul. But she is a scientist actively engaged in public outreach, working to bring the wonder and curiosity of the natural world to people, even those who may have no interest in natural history museums, nature documentaries or natural history magazines. Those people probably care about […]

University of Utah anthropologists counted the number of carbon-dated artifacts at archaeological sites and concluded that a population boom and scarce food explain why people in eastern North America domesticated plants for the first time on the continent about 5,000 years ago. “Domesticated plants and animals are part of our everyday lives, so much so […]

Engineers from the University of Utah and the University of Minnesota have discovered that interfacing two particular oxide-based materials makes them highly conductive, a boon for future electronics that could result in much more power-efficient laptops, electric cars and home appliances that also don’t need cumbersome power supplies. Their findings were published this month in […]

For the last 10 weeks, University of Utah student Georgie Corkery has investigated sustainable urban farming options for Salt Lake, and she will present her work at a symposium Wednesday, July 27, at the University of Utah Guest House, 110 S. Fort Douglas Boulevard, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Corkery is among 18 undergraduate students from universities […]

Unfortunately, loss of plant and animal habitat leads to local species extinctions and a loss of diversity from ecosystems. Fortunately, not all of the extinctions occur at once. Conservation actions may still be able to save threatened species, according to William Newmark, a vertebrate zoologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University […]