When new AIDS virus particles bud from an infected cell, an enzyme named protease activates to help the viruses mature and infect more cells. That’s why modern AIDS drugs control the disease by inhibiting protease. Now, University of Utah researchers found a way to turn protease into a double-edged sword: They showed that if they […]

  A Utah mountainside collapsed 4,800 years ago in a gargantuan landslide known as a “rock avalanche,” creating the flat floor of what is now Zion National Park by damming the Virgin River to create a lake that existed for 700 years. Those are key conclusions of a new University of Utah study that provides […]

  Older Americans with some hearing loss shouldn’t feel alone if they have trouble understanding British TV sagas like “Downton Abbey.” A small study from the University of Utah suggests hearing-impaired senior citizens have more trouble than young people comprehending British accents when there is background noise. “The older hearing-impaired had just a little more […]

By showing that a phenomenon dubbed the “inverse spin Hall effect” works in several organic semiconductors – including carbon-60 buckyballs – University of Utah physicists changed magnetic “spin current” into electric current. The efficiency of this new power conversion method isn’t yet known, but it might find use in future electronic devices including batteries, solar […]

Fire, a tool broadly used for cooking, constructing, hunting and even communicating, was arguably one of the earliest discoveries in human history. But when, how and why it came to be used is hotly debated among scientists. A new scenario crafted by University of Utah anthropologists proposes that human ancestors became dependent on fire as […]

Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, a series of Siberian volcanoes erupted and sent the Earth into the greatest mass extinction of all time. As a result of this mass extinction, known as the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction, billions of tons of carbon were propelled into the atmosphere, radically altering the Earth’s climate. Yet, some […]

For humans to understand speech and for other animals to know each other’s calls, the brain must distinguish short sounds from longer sounds. By studying frogs, University of Utah researchers figured out how certain brain cells compute the length of sounds and detect short ones. In addition to pitch and loudness, “sound duration is of […]

University of Utah lab experiments found that when temperatures get warmer, woodrats suffer a reduced ability to live on their normal diet of toxic creosote – suggesting that global warming may hurt plant-eating animals. “This study adds to our understanding of how climate change may affect mammals, in that their ability to consume dietary toxins […]

Jan. 12, 2016 – University of Utah chemist Peter J. Stang shook hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping after Stang and six other foreign scientists were honored with China’s 2015 International Science and Technology Cooperation Award. “I said ‘thank you’ to him in Chinese and he smiled,” says Stang, recalling the Jan. 8 award ceremony […]