Interdisciplinary Research

Madzuu is a village in Kenya’s western highlands and Lake Victoria basin where the rainfall is abundant, and there is some access to urban markets. And yet about 61 percent of the village population earned less than 50 cents a day in real terms in both 1989 and 2002. Many people there are trapped in chronic poverty from which escape is difficult.

Alice Pell, professor of animal science at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is the principal investigator on a five-year, multidisciplinary

There are no general laws of human relationships as there are for physics, but a leading marital researcher and group of applied mathematicians have teamed up to create a mathematical model that predicts which couples will divorce with astonishing accuracy. The model holds promise of giving therapists new tools for helping couples overcome patterns of interaction that can send them rushing down the road toward divorce.

Psychologist John Gottman and applied mathematicians James D. Murray and

Findings Could Lead to Faster Electronic Devices

Working at the nexus of biology and nanotechnology, a researcher and an alumnus from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have released findings that could lead to the tailoring of bacterial processes for a host of smaller, faster semiconductors and other electronic devices.

Pulickel Ajayan, professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer, and geobiologist Ronald Oremland reported that three different kinds of common

“The light shines brilliantly these days at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). The start up of SSRL’s new synchrotron light facility, SPEAR3, guarantees a world-class program in x-ray science for years to come,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. “This is the first time the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health have joined in funding an accelerator research facility. I expect this to be a long and productive collaboration whose impact will be truly

Preparing for the arrival of the first European Automated Transfer Vehicle. Europe’s scientific utilisation of the International Space Station (ISS) took an important step forward with the launch of an unmanned Russian Progress cargo spacecraft today at 12:58 Central European Time (16:58 local time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Progress supply vehicle will take two days to reach the International Space Station, carrying experiment hardware for the Delta mission to be

Using math and physics to investigate mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) and similar diseases caused by infectious proteins called prions is the aim of research by physicists Daniel Cox, Rajiv Singh and colleagues at UC Davis. The researchers are using mathematical models to study issues such as the incubation time, prion “strains” and treatment or detection strategies.

Diseases such as BSE in cattle, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans and chronic wasting disease in d