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Research at Boston University 2004
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Love Songs |
| African indigobirds reproduce and then lay their eggs in the nests of firefinches, where the young hatchlings learn the songs of their adoptive parents. |
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Mending Broken Hearts |
| All those love songs promising that injured hearts will heal with time are not, alas, to be taken literally. In a heart attack, a coronary artery becomes obstructed, and heart muscle cells downstream from the blockage are starved of oxygen and nutrients. |
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Shocking Kidney Stones |
| Robin Cleveland has never had a kidney stone, but he can sympathize with friends, colleagues, and the 1.3 million Americans who develop the excruciatingly painful stones every year. |
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Engineering Better Medicine |
| Jim Collins is well known for applying engineering tools to biological problems and arriving at creative and effective solutions. Now Collins is leading a team that has developed a simple, direct way to understand how genes and proteins interact to regulate processes within a cell, a tissue, or an organism. |
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Leaping Tall Buildings in a Single Bound |
| Superman was able to effectively fight crime in some measure because he didn’t have to take the stairs. In an analogous way, chemists Thomas Keyes and John Straub, and computer scientist Steven Homer are building computational tools that allow them to skip the small steps in simulating such complex processes as how proteins fold and how liquids form glasses. |
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Of Form and Function |
| Much of the world we know, from jumbo jets to computer chips, is made of polycrystals -- materials that combine two or more crystalline elements. |
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Martian Ice Age |
| Somewhere between 400,000 and 2.1 million years ago, very recent history in geological terms, Mars was immersed in an ice age similar in many ways to those that have occurred on Earth. |
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Watching the Brain Watch |
| It’s sort of like looking down a hall of mirrors: trying to see how the brain sees while it’s, well, seeing. |
Research Magazine |
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Research at Boston University 2004 (PDF)
This publication details some of the many scientific insights and opportunities that Boston University’s classrooms and laboratories are generating today.
Download Adobe Acrobat Reader |
Science and Technology Day 2004 featured more than 160 presentations by graduate students across all disciplines and schools of the University. Scott Whitaker, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, who presided over a judges panel of more than 30 faculty members, commented on the excellent quality of all the presentations this year.
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